VENTURES 
IN  WORLDS 

MARIAN  COX 


VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 


BY    MARIAN    COX 

SPIRITUAL   CURIOSITIES 

VENTURES   IN   WORLDS 

CROWDS  AND  THE  VEILED  WOMAN 


MARIAN  COX 

[PHOTOGRAPH  BY  ARNOLD  GENTHE] 


VENTURES 
IN  WORLDS 


BY 

MARIAN  COX 


NEW  YORK 

MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 
1915 


COPYRIGHT,  IQIS,  BY 
MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 


PRINTED   IN   AMERICA 


CONTENTS 

IN  NEW  WORLDS 

PAGE 

OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE  3 

OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE  45 

OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY  94> 

IN  OLD  WORLDS 

THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN  OF  JAPAN  123 

A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN  167 

MR.  GRUNDY  AND  EVE'S  DRESS  196 


3418G3 


IN  NEW  WORLDS 


VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE 

AS  we  devour  the  printed  page  for  knowl- 
edge of  the  Crazy  War  that  is  devastating 
the  Old  World,  at  this  moment,  we  read  con- 
stantly of  music,  as  it  figures  in  records  of  the 
singing  soldiers,  the  national  anthems,  the 
bugles  and  the  drums,  the  regimental  bands 
that  play  during  battle,  the  gramophones  in  the 
trenches,  and  of  all  that  terrible  sonority  which 
is  resounding  through  the  world  inspired  by  the 
fatal  song  of  Germany:  "Germany  over  all." 

And  war,  the  supreme  art  of  the  savage,  and 
music,  the  supreme  art  of  the  cultured,  have 
met  as  allies  in  this  century's  Dance  of  Death 
that  will  conquer  by  baton  as  by  bayonet. 

This  is  the  War  of  Culture.  So  Germany, 
its  sponsor,  has  declared;  and  modern  culture 
is  characterized  by  music  more  strongly  than 
by  any  other  influence  of  art.  Human  nature 


4          VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

is  sincere  in  this  art;  for  music  is  the  so-called 
language  of  the  emotions  and  the  emotional  be- 
ing is  not  a  falsifier  such  as  the  thinking  being. 
Music  is  thus  the  most  natural  art  of  man  al- 
though it  did  not  attain  its  consummate  expres- 
sion until  the  nineteenth  century.  It  is  curious 
to  see  how  musical  expression  has  developed 
with  the  complexities  and  struggles  of  modern 
civilization  as  though  it  were  the  only  natural 
outlet  left  to  cultured  man  and  so  he  must  pour 
his  soul  into  his  song. 

The  genius  of  the  age  is  the  genius  of  matter, 
of  the  triumph  of  things.  There  is  Romanism 
in  it  and  skyscrapers  and  the  survival-of-the- 
fittest.  Music  is  perfectly  adapted  as  an  art- 
medium  to  the  genius  of  this  age,  and  it  exposes 
as  nothing  else  the  modern  soul  of  man  in  its 
passionate  egoism,  its  mystic  cruelty,  its  ruth- 
less hunger  for  vitality  and  change,  its  cry  for 
life,  in  short. 

Music  has  always  found  its  highest  expres- 
sion at  periods  of  aggressive  materialism  such 
as  the  present  time  and  in  the  conquering  days 
of  imperial  Rome.  Modern  music,  in  fact,  is 
said  to  be  "the  last  great  legacy  which  Rome 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE         5 

has  left  to  the  world."  The  Greeks,  though 
the  most  aesthetic  people  the  world  has  known, 
developed  every  art  except  that  of  music.  It 
is  true  they  created  the  theory  of  music  as  a 
sort  of  intellectual  feat  but,  outside  of  that, 
they  showed  no  comprehension  of  the  nature 
and  effects  of  music,  as  we  know  them  to-day. 
The  Greeks  lived  out  their  lives  so  simply, 
freely  and  objectively  that  they  never  discov- 
ered the  subjective  sources  of  music  as  the 
Romans  did.  Rome  boasted  of  her  opposition 
to  all  the  arts  and  yet  the  renaissance  of  music 
began  beneath  her  iron  heel.  Her  concrete 
and  austere  mind  was  incapable  of  the  broad 
culture  that  humanized  the  Greeks  and  yet 
musical  culture  found  its  first  congenial  soil  in 
those  law-making,  force-worshipping  days 
when  Christianity  was  contributing  nothing 
as  yet  but  more  conflicts,  new  kinds  of  conflicts 
and  oppressions  to  the  existence  of  man. 

The  monks  of  the  Roman  Church  first 
evolved  the  subjective  element  in  modern  mu- 
sic, for  the  erotico-religious  diathesis  is  essen- 
tial to  creativeness  in  music — as  in  every  art — 
and  this  received  its  greatest  impetus  from 


6          VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

those  renunciatory,  monastic  souls  who  sought 
in  music  what  was  denied  to  them  in  life. 

But  at  last — like  all  predatory  materialists 
— Rome  grew  senile  and  suicidal,  and  suc- 
cumbed through  sheer  fear  of  life  before  the 
young  German  barbarians  that  rushed  in  to 
conquer  the  Roman  Empire,  then  the  World's 
Empire.  Perhaps  the  hordes  of  young  blond 
beasts  sang  then  as  they  are  singing  now  their 
terrible  song  of  "Germany  over  All."  And 
the  sovereignty  of  music  passed  on  from  Rome 
to  Germany. 

Mammon,  Megalomania  and  Melomania. 
They  breathed  like  three  Fatalities  in  the 
spirit  of  Rome;  and  Germany,  her  conqueror, 
has  been  the  first  inheritor  of  that  Roman 
spirit,  second  to  which  comes  our  own  imperial 
young  America.  Musical,  military  Germany 
• — so  modern  and  yet  ancient  as  Rome !  There 
is  a  difference  of  degree  and  not  of  kind  be- 
tween the  war-lusts  of  Cgesar's  conquests  and 
the  music-lusts  of  Wagner's  day. 

But  the  Roman  spirit  is  the  distinctly  mod- 
ern spirit  in  Germany.  Dormant  for  centu- 
ries, its  culture  has  burst  into  its  century-plant- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE        7 

like  bloom  during  a  brief  period,  beginning 
with  the  Bismarckian  influence.  Once  there 
was  a  Golden  Age  in  German  culture,  a  hun- 
dred years  ago,  when  the  German  mind  was 
idealistic  instead  of  materialistic  and  produced 
all  its  great  poets  and  philosophers,  its  Goethe, 
Kant  and  Schiller.  That  was  before  the  Ger- 
man knew  how  great  he  was.  Not  yet  tutored 
in  the  snobbery  of  his  culture — German  Cul- 
ture over  All! — his  mind  retained  its  capacity 
for  true  culture.  Culture  is  a  result  of  our  ad- 
mirations and  not  of  our  antagonisms ;  but  the 
Herr  Instructors  of  Germany  reversed  this 
order.  The  cultured  mind,  or  mind  capable 
of  culture,  is  an  open  mind,  receptive,  growing, 
healthy — plastic  and  mobile  like  all  living 
things.  But  the  modern  cultured  mind  of 
Germany  is  a  closed  mind,  closed  by  antagon- 
ism, chauvinism,  the  sickliness  of  arrogance 
and  pose.  The  soldier  could  not  exist  in  hu- 
man society  except  for  the  snob ;  and  the  most 
incendiary  doctrine  in  the  world  is  to  teach  the 
little  man  how  great  he  is  for  he  has  no  means 
of  proving  it  except  by  fighting. 

There  are  many  ways  to  make  man  crazy. 


8          VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

One  is  to  teach  him  his  own  supremacy  in  an 
irreverent  universe;  and  another  is  to  intoxi- 
cate him  with  his  own  ego  through  music. 
Both  influences  have  heen  exerted  upon  the 
unfortunate  German  proletariat  by  modern 
culture,  the  culture  of  baton  and  bayonet. 

Two  insane  kings  of  Germany,  Emperor 
William  the  Second,  the  great  Megalomaniac 
who  started  the  Self -over- All  movement,  and 
his  cousin  Ludwig  of  Bavaria,  the  great  Melo- 
maniac  who  started  the  Wagner  movement, 
were  the  gardeners  of  this  modern  culture 
whose  monstrous  seed  has  produced  the  Furor 
Teutonicus  which  craves  a  world's  plaudits  for 
its  bloody  arena  of  Glory. 

Surely  the  sane  remnant  of  humankind 
should  feel  compelled  at  last  to  attack  this 
royal  Prestige  of  Culture  that  ministers  to  the 
roots  of  war.  The  very  word,  Culture!  has 
possessed  such  a  charm  for  us.  Above  all  its 
other  forms — Musical  Culture!  has  been  so 
sounding  and  subtle  in  its  spell,  so  bewitching, 
alluring,  ego-tickling  and  glorified — that  it  re- 
quires a  new  point  of  view  now  that  all  culture 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE         9 

is  under  suspicion  because  of  the  twentieth- 
century  Fall  of  Man. 

Perhaps  a  recent  personal  experience  has 
prejudiced  me  in  my  association  of  musical 
culture  with  the  spirit  of  the  great  war.  Last 
summer  I  was  one  of  the  marooned  Americans 
in  Europe;  and  the  war-panic  landed  me  in 
Bayreuth  during  those  staggering  first  weeks 
of  the  mobilization  that  followed  after  August 
the  first.  Now  he  to  whom  the  name  of  Bay- 
reuth is  meaningless  must  confess  himself  one 
of  the  unanointed  in  Culture's  forms  and 
creeds ;  for  little  Bayreuth  of  Bavaria  wields  an 
influence  upon  modern  culture  as  great  as  that 
once  possessed  by  little  Weimer  during  the 
days  of  the  Goethe- Schwaermerei.  Until  the 
fatal  date  last  summer  when  big  Berlin  under- 
took the  job  of  spreading  culture,  little  Bay- 
reuth was  actually  making  a  world-conquest 
for  German  culture  which  now  can  never  be 
accomplished,  but  ruined,  by  Berlin's  cannons 
of  culture.  Bayreuth  brought  the  world  to 
Germany,  Berlin  has  driven  the  world  from 
Germany.  Bayreuth  was  the  Pied  Piper  of 


10        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

civilization;  and  we  flocked  willingly  to  its 
strains  as  culture's  elect;  Wagnerites,  Nietz- 
scheans,  Pro-Teutons,  super-educated  Amer- 
icans, nomadic  royalties,  and  gilt-edged  cos- 
mopolitans. Everybody  who  was  anybody 
went  to  Bayreuth,  or  hoped  to  go  to  Bayreuth, 
once  in  a  lifetime,  at  least,  like  an  ambitious 
Moslem  to  Mecca. 

In  Bayreuth — is  it  superogatory  to  state? 
— Wagner,  "The  Cagliostro  of  Modernism," 
was  born  and  lived  and  died,  in  the  flesh  but 
not  in  the  spirit.  While  he  lived  he  had  the 
Bayreuther  Blatter — said  to  be  "the  only 
instance  known  of  a  newspaper  founded  ex- 
clusively for  the  deification  of  a  living  man"- 
and  dead  he  has  all  Bayreuth  living  upon  his 
name  and  tomb  which  attracts  all  the  music- 
idolators  of  Europe  and  America.  The  heart 
of  Wagnerism,  of  course,  is  Bayreuth;  but 
culture  has  brought  other  rich  contributions  to 
its  atmosphere — in  the  way  of,  to  him  who 
hath  shall  be  given — and  there  is  a  Bayreuth- 
ianism  of  culture  in  which  the  most  influential 
great  names  figure  as  residents  at  one  time  or 
other.  Jean  Paul  Richter  lived  here,  and  Max 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       11 

Sterner  who  wrote  the  "Ego  and  his  Own" 
and  Nietzsche  and  Houston  Chamberlain;  and 
an  endless  list  of  illustrious  names  could  be 
added  to  those  that  have  bestowed  such  a  daz- 
zling prestige  upon  the  little  capital  of  Upper 
Franconia. 

Every  two  years  the  Wagnerian  Festival 
takes  place  in  Bayreuth  and  the  town  is  then 
filled  with  the  visiting  foreigners  and  notabil- 
ities upon  whose  revenue  the  population  almost 
entirely  subsists.  It  was  during  the  Festival 
period  that  I  made  my  involuntary  visit  to 
Bayreuth. 

We  were  at  Carlsbad  when  the  tocsin  of 
war  sounded  and  were  part  of  the  helter- 
skelter  exodus  that  fled,  with  American  trust 
and  scepticism,  in  any  direction  that  seemed  to 
point  "home."  The  day  after  the  news  of 
Germany's  declaration  of  war  penetrated  to 
the  Spa,  we  fled  in  a  French  automobile  with  a 
French  chauffeur  straight  into  Germany;  and 
there  the  now  well-known  tourist's  troubles  in 
the  war-zone  began  for  us.  The  spy-mania 
was  at  its  height.  Every  town  and  hamlet 
had  its  mob  espying  a  spy  in  every  foreigner, 


12        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

with  a  savage  fanaticism  that  carried  one  back 
to  the  witch-hunting  days  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Those  peasant-mobs  of  the  Bavarian  hills, 
through  which  we  passed,  had  been  told  that 
the  Foreigners  had  brought  a  War  upon  Ger- 
many! and  their  fear  of  the  foreigner  ex- 
pressed itself  in  a  malignant  suspicion  and  per- 
secution of  every  hapless  foreigner  caught  in 
the  trap  of  Europe's  catastrophe.  "It  is  all 
ignorance,"  we  declared  to  ourselves,  for  the 
sake  of  human  faith,  "this  insensate  fear  and 
hate  that  makes  war  on  an  automobile  because 
it  is  marked  'French,'  or  upon  a  whole  world 
because  it  is  marked  by  frontiers — it  is  nothing 
but  ignorance."  Well,  it  would  make  a  long 
story,  that  of  our  perilous  flight  and  escapes 
from  German  village  doltishness ;  and  my  sub- 
ject limits  me  to  the  musical  side  of  my  fright- 
ful adventure,  which  began  after  our  arrival  in 
Bayreuth. 

Bayreuth,  with  its  fame  for  culture  and  its 
evidence  of  civilization,  seemed  at  first  like  a 
haven  to  our  peace-loving  American  souls,  so 
averse  to  the  "dangerous  living"  which 
Nietzsche  extols  as  a  "tonic  for  the  system." 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       13 

"Here,  surely,  a  poor  foreign  devil  is  safe," 
we  said.  "Without  trains  or  automobile,  or 
trunks  or  passports  or  credit  or  money  or  a 
Thomas  Cook's  or  a  Consul,  here  surely  we  are 
safe  because  Bayreuth  is  a  city  of  culture  and  a 
resort  of  foreigners." 

We  were  hungering  for  some  sign  of  the 
old  European  courtship  of  foreigners,  so  fa- 
miliar to  Americans,  and  believed  some  flick- 
ering grace  of  it  would  be  found  in  this  sophis- 
ticated haunt  of  cosmopolitanism.  But  alas! 
we  spent  three  weeks  in  Bayreuth  trying  to 
prove  that  we  were  desirable  aliens  with  no  de- 
sire to  spy  upon  anything  except  a  way  out 
of  our  own  troubles;  and  it  looked  as  if  we 
would  have  to  remain  there  until  the  war  was 
over — unwanted  and  yet  withheld — until  a 
certain  lucky  accident,  which  is  another  story. 

Those  three  weeks  in  Bayreuth  possessed  the 
vibrant  monotony  of  a  bit  of  eternity  in  a  Hell 
of  Suspense.  The  mobilization  was  going  on 
and  all  Bayreuth  was  in  suspense  as  it  watched 
the  soldiers  springing  forth  from  its  civilian 
life,  like  a  crop  of  Cadmus-teeth.  Nobody 
seemed  to  know  what  had  happened,  why  it 


14        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

had  happened,  or  what  was  about  to  happen. 
There  was  "no  news"  except  the  official  news 
that  bewildered  instead  of  convinced.  At  the 
Wagner-Festspielhaus  during  the  last  act  of 
"Parsifal,"  Saturday  night,  the  singers  and  the 
audience  had  been  informed  for  the  first  time, 
of  Germany's  declaration  of  war.  This  meant 
the  immediate  closing  of  the  opera  house,  the 
cancelling  of  all  contracts,  the  tearing  down 
of  the  festival  decorations  from  the  houses  and 
streets,  and  the  precipitate  flight  of  the  visiting 
music-lovers  and  music-makers  upon  the  last 
passenger  trains  before  they  were  monopolized 
for  the  troops.  Bayreuth  is  a  garrison  town; 
and  thereafter,  every  hour  of  the  day  and  the 
night,  the  whistling  little  trains  arrived  at  the 
Bahnhof  to  take  away  their  load  of  youth  for 
the  minotaur,  War,  across  the  frontiers. 

A  new  kind  of  singing  then  reverberated 
through  those  Wagnerian  streets  attuned  to 
the  hush  of  a  seeing,  hearing,  sympathetic  cul- 
ture to  the  soul-cry  of  man.  The  singing  of 
the  soldiers  as  they  passed  through  the  hushed 
streets  in  small  tramping  troops,  so  brand-new 
and  strong,  swinging  their  limbs  together  as 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       15 

rhythmically  as  a  machine.  Sometimes  the 
wives  and  children  trudged  along  beside  the 
troops,  mutely,  until  they  reached  the  station 
and  the  trains  started  off  with  the  singing 
soldiers,  and  then  they  cheered.  But  the 
whistle  of  the  train  always  drowned  the  final 
cheering  and  singing,  like  the  shriek  of  some 
triumphant  thing  that  carries  off  its  prey  to 
the  bourne  whence  no  traveller  returns. 

The  little  station  was  just  opposite  the  hotel 
where  we  stopped  and  they  passed  by  our  win- 
dows every  hour :  infantry  and  cavalry,  march- 
ing to  the  measure  of  their  song,  or  rumbling 
over  the  cobblestones  with  their  commissariat 
and  cannon.  One  lady  at  our  hotel  frequently 
broke  down  and  wept,  declaring  that  she  could 
"stand  anything  except  the  singing  of  the 
soldiers." 

The  first  few  days  at  Bayreuth,  we  seemed 
to  be  the  only  derelicts  from  the  foreign  hegira, 
but  soon  a  small  community  of  the  stranded 
were  discovered  to  each  other ;  and  we  collected 
together,  now  and  then,  for  the  exchange  of 
rumors  and  the  gregarious  illusion  of  safety. 
In  the  company  of  misery  our  war-stunned 


16        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

minds  found  many  small  comforts  for  our 
plight.  It  was  a  comfort  to  find  that  Madam 
Schumann-Heink  was  with  us, — she  was  as 
vociferously  American  in  Germany  as  she  is 
vociferously  German  in  America! — and  to  en- 
counter Dr.  Muck,  of  the  Boston  Symphony, 
who  always  brought  "news"  in  the  German 
language  which  kept  us  zealously  curious,  as 
we  could  not  understand  a  word  of  it;  and  it 
filled  us  with  a  comforting  sense  of  the  in- 
discriminating  justice  of  German  authority  to 
discover  as  we  did  that  the  man  who  is  often 
referred  to  nowadays  as  one  of  the  chief  collab- 
orators of  Germany's  gospel  of  war,  Houston 
Chamberlain,  was  under  strict  Police  surveil- 
lance in  Bayreuth  as  a  foreigner,  a  pseudo- 
Englishman  and  potential  spy. 

But  we  dared  not  venture  forth  upon  the 
streets  of  Bayreuth  for  fear  of  the  mob  that 
reigned  as  despotically  in  this  musically  cul- 
tured atmosphere  as  in  the  benighted  districts 
that  had  never  heard  the  tones  that  are  said  to 
soothe  the  savage  breast  of  man.  Not  a  day 
passed  without  hearing  of  some  vandalism 
committed  by  the  mob.  A  shop-window 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       17 

broken  because  it  bore  the  French  sign  "Cafe," 
an  automobile  smashed  because  it  was  of  for- 
eign make,  some  poor  alien  wanderer  attacked 
as  a  spy;  and  once  a  Russian  Princess,  sister 
of  the  Czar,  a  Festival  visitor  in  Bayreuth, 
fell  into  the  hands  of  the  mob  and  was  seri- 
ously injured  before  rescued  by  some  cosmo- 
politan-spirited Bavarians.  Those  beery,  mu- 
sical Philistines  who  composed  the  mob,  but 
were  called  "the  people,"  of  Bayreuth,  must 
have  found  that  kind  of  intoxication  in  popu- 
lar outbursts  of  fury  which  Wagner  tells 
about  in  his  "Life,"  when  confessing  to  his 
share  in  the  students'  vandalism  at  Leipzig. 
But  the  climax  came  in  the  rumor,  which  con- 
stantly recurred,  that  the  Festspielhaus  was 
about  to  be  burned  down  by  the  "people"  be- 
cause it  had  been  the  cause  of  the  foreigner's 
invasion  of  Bayreuth,  and  it  was  the  foreign- 
ers now  who  were  seeking  to  destroy  the  Fa- 
therland and  its  Culture. 

While  in  Bayreuth  I  suffered  a  series  of 
disillusions  regarding  all  that  I  had  fancied, 
previously,  about  the  psychologic  results  of 
musical  culture,  and  the  completion  of  the 


18        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

process  came  through  a  personal  contact  with 
Siegfried,  son  of  Richard  Wagner.  Siegfried 
Wagner  is  known  to  all  the  cognoscenti  of 
modern  music,  for  he  rules  like  a  sovereign  in 
their  world  of  culture  and  careers.  His  favor, 
or  royal  invitation  to  sing  at  Bayreuth  is  the 
ultima  thule  of  every  musical  student  and 
singer  in  Germany.  His  nod  can  make  or  un- 
make fortunes.  His  smile  confers  the  nth  de- 
gree of  distinction  upon  the  golden-throated. 
A  great  father  and  a  great  mother,  Cosima, 
daughter  of  Franz  Liszt,  inherited  gifts,  a 
vast  fortune  (he  is  reputed  to  be  worth  60,000,- 
000  marks  which  everybody  in  Bayreuth  will 
tell  you  as  the  first  item  in  his  biography)  and 
a  world-ennobled  place — these  have  been  the 
factors  for  the  creation  of  this  personality 
which  one  can  justly  expect  to  embody  the 
culled  flower  of  our  civilization. 

Siegfried  Wagner  is  a  picturesque  figure  on 
the  streets  of  Bayreuth,  where  we  saw  him  pass 
every  day  at  a  certain  hour,  on  his  way  to  the 
Biirgerreuth  or  to  the  station  to  meet  the 
trains  of  soldiers  to  whom  he  distributed  auto- 
graphed post-card  pictures  of  himself,  with  the 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       19 

naive  liberality  of  a  master  of  life's  gifts.  He 
was  invariably  accompanied  by  a  huge  St. 
Bernard  dog,  and  several  Fraus  or  Frauleins 
who  followed  in  his  wake  and  had  the  prim 
womanly  air  of  instruction  in  applause  if  not 
in  music.  He  is  below  the  average  height  for 
a  German,  and  always  wore  knickerbockers 
and  was  hatless  upon  the  streets.  A  shock  of 
grey  hair  crowning  a  long-featured  large  face 
gives  him  a  sort  of  pale  leonine  distinction. 
He  walks  in  quick  nervous  steps,  but  slightly 
bent  forward,  with  a  self-absorbed  unseeing 
air,  as  if  he  were  in  a  tremendous  hurry  about 
nothing  at  all,  except  himself.  He  has  a 
Semitic  profile,  in  blondness,  and  round  china- 
blue  eyes,  hard  as  steel,  though  their  contour 
is  drooping.  Evidently  he  is  very  vain  of  his 
appearance,  for  one  sees  it  portrayed  every- 
where, on  every  wall  and  in  every  shop-win- 
dow, in  every  pose  and  form  and  surroundings, 
in  Bayreuth.  The  Owl  Restaurant  has  a  room 
entirely  devoted  to  Siegfried's  portraiture,  at 
every  age,  and  it  was  here  that  I  met  him  one 
evening. 

Every  evening,  at  the  same  hour,  Siegfried 


20        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

can  be  seen  at  the  Owl  Restaurant,  which  is 
situated  obscurely  in  a  back-alley,  but  englam- 
oured  as  a  one-time  rendezvous  of  Richard 
Wagner.  Here  the  master  used  to  drink  beer 
and  eat  white  radish  every  night  at  a  cer- 
tain hour;  and  every  night  at  a  certain  hour, 
the  son  can  now  be  seen  drinking  beer  and  eat- 
ing white  radish  just  like  his  father.  I  was 
introduced  to  him  by  one  of  the  stranded  sing- 
ers who  trembled  at  his  own  temerity  in  intro- 
ducing "a  foreigner,  at  this  time,  to  Herr 
Wagner."  But  our  exchange  of  words  was 
brief. 

"Do  you  speak  German?"  were  his  first 
words  to  me,  uttered  out  of  one  side  of  his 
mouth,  full  of  white  radish. 

At  my  negative  reply  he  turned  away  and 
made  fluent  comments  in  his  own  language  to 
his  party  of  ladies.  My  companion  translated 
for  me  that  the  Herr  Wagner  expressed  as- 
tonishment at  the  daring  of  Americans  in  thus 
venturing  into  lands  where  they  did  not  speak 
the  language.  Then  the  great  man  turned  to 
me  again,  but  only  to  stare,  silently,  for  awhile, 
as  though  he  were  trying  to  make  up  his  mind 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       21 

about  that  ubiquitous  creature  before  him,  the 
American  woman,  who,  so  evidently,  does  not 
know  her  place  at  home.  His  eyes  were  very 
round  and  hard,  his  face  in  a  cud-like  absorp- 
tion, before  he  began  to  question  me  with  the 
mannerless  abruptness  of  a  child  or  a  king. 
I  had  been  told  before  I  met  him  that  he  had 
"the  manners  of  royalty." 

"What  does  America  think  of  the  war?"  he 
asked. 

"How  can  we  know?"  I  replied,  despair- 
ingly. "We  have  been  in  Germany  since  the 
war  began.  But" — I  added,  with  the  tact 
learned  by  much  globe-trotting — "America  is 
the  friend  of  Germany.  It  is  said  that  one 
quarter  of  the  American  people  are  Germans, 
you  know,  by  birth  or  descent." 

At  this  a  vague  smile  of  approval  lightened 
his  heavy  face.  He  translated  my  remark  to 
his  ladies  and  seemed  to  discuss  the  war  with 
them,  for  awhile,  pleasingly,  without  opposi- 
tion to  his  views.  The  German  lady  is  so 
well-raised  to  please  the  musical  and  martial 
male!  And  then  he  turned  again  to  me  and 
stared  and  chewed  and  thought  and  chewed, 


22        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

before  he  gave  me  the  fruit  of  his  ruminations 
in  a  startling  oracular  remark. 

"This  war  is  America's  opportunity,"  an- 
nounced Siegfried  Wagner.  "America  ought 
to  grab  Canada  and  grab  Mexico  and  grab 
everything  else  she  can  get." 

The  rest  of  our  conversation  is  irrelevant; 
besides  I  can  never  get  beyond  the  memory 
of  this  Grab-policy  of  life,  as  the  enunciated 
faith  of  a  High  Priest  of  Culture,  in  my 
reminiscences  of  Bayreuth.  Since  then  I  have 
placed  the  musicians,  the  militarists  and  the 
millionaires  all  together  as  the  makers  of  our 
modern  predatory  civilization. 

A  recent  newspaper  interview  quotes  the 
Princess  von  Biilow  (the  American-born  wife 
of  the  German  prince)  as  saying: 

"I  would  I  might  have  a  thousand  tongues 
to  tell  everybody  in  the  land  of  my  birth  how 
gloriously  noble  and  great  our  Germany  is. 
Here  is  the  true  justice,  here  true  greatness. 
When  I  see  the  troops  pass  by,  when  I  feel 
the  breeze  of  the  spirit  that  now  goes  through 
all  Germany,  then  I  seem  to  be  in  Bayreuth 
again  at  the  inauguration  day  of  the  Fest- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       23 

spielhaus  when  Richard  Wagner  raised  the 
baton  and  the  Ninth  Symphony  resounded  in 
splendid  harmony,  or  three  years  later,  when 
for  the  first  time,  and  directly  by  the  master 
himself,  the  Ring  der  Nibelungen  brought  his 
inspiring  accords  to  my  ear." 

I,  too,  will  always  see  Bayreuth  and  the 
Festspielhaus  again  when  I  remember  the  pass- 
ing troops  of  German  soldiers,  singing  as  if 
to  the  Wagnerian  libretto  of  "Grab,  grab, 
grab." 

After  I  returned  to  America,  it  struck  me 
for  the  first  time  that  our  Empire  city  has 
adopted  the  culture  of  Bayreuth  as  she  has 
adopted  the  clothes  of  Paris :  one  as  the  decora- 
tion of  the  mind,  the  other  as  the  decoration 
of  the  body.  It  is  but  a  step  from  the  Huns 
of  German  culture  to  the  Snobs  of  American 
culture. 

In  America,  our  musical  culture  has  been  a 
costly  indulgence  which  may  yet  cost  us  our 
dearly  bought  Democracy.  To  consider  the 
money  side  alone,  it  is  amazing  to  realize  that 
the  United  States  spends  annually  600,000,000 
dollars  for  its  people's  music,  a  sum  three  times 


24        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

greater  than  that  which  it  spends  for  the  army 
and  navy.  The  price  of  our  musical  in- 
dulgence makes  insignificant,  in  comparison, 
even  the  large  sum  represented  by  the  liquor 
bill,  another  form  of  our  national  weaknesses. 
But  the  human  toll  we  pay  for  music  is  more 
interesting  to  estimate  than  the  financial 
cost. 

It  is  estimated  that  ten  thousand  young  girls 
come  to  the  Metropolis  every  year  for  the  pur- 
pose of  studying  music.  How  many  of  this 
number  are  ever  heard  of  afterwards  in  the 
musical  professions?  Their  little  veneer  of 
musical  culture  merely  unfits  them  for  their 
homes;  and  the  lure  of  music  for  American 
womankind  has  broken  up  more  homes  and  has 
broken  more  hearts  than  all  the  other  lures 
that  we  have  heard  so  much  about,  the  past 
year.  Our  constant  flow  of  young  blood  to 
Europe — and  especially  to  Germany — is 
chiefly  in  quest  of  this  ignis  fatuus  of  the  am- 
bitious; and  musical  ambition  has  been  more 
derogatory  to  American  prestige  and  ideals 
than  the  financial  ambition,  for  which  we  are 
so  much  accused.  The  Old  World  comes  to 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       25 

America  for  money;  but  we  desert  the  New 
World  for  music. 

Everybody  recognizes  the  fact  that  some- 
thing has  destroyed  the  true  values  and  hap- 
piness in  the  home-life  of  the  American  people, 
but  no  one,  as  yet,  has  traced  it  to  its  source: 
the  influence  wielded  over  the  home  by  the 
modern  musical  culture  that  is  symbolized  by 
the  piano  in  my  lady's  parlor.  The  royal  pre- 
rogatives of  the  piano  is  the  only  original  dis- 
covery made  by  the  American  woman.  The 
piano  has  never  affected  the  middle  class  of 
England,  the  bourgeois  of  France,  or  the  folk 
of  Germany — in  which  countries  it  is  also  the 
symbol  of  gentility ! — as  it  has  affected  the 
American  "people"  in  their  homes.  In  the 
East  it  is  at  the  core  of  our  servant-problem, 
in  the  West  of  our  servant-famine.  It  has 
cast  the  social  odium  upon  the  hands  that  work, 
and  has  sicklified  with  vanity  the  hands  that 
play  on  the  piano.  It  has  made  "a  lady"  out 
of  what  would  have  been  a  wholesome  female, 
and  this  perversion  of  nature  constitutes  a 
common  tragedy  of  domestic  life,  particularly 
in  rural  districts.  The  saloon  thrives  in  sec- 


26        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

tions  where  there  is  a  thriving  commerce  in 
pianos.  One  musical  member  of  a  family  can 
demoralize  all  the  rest  with  false  ideals,  nerves, 
and  the  sacrifice  of  one's  individual  taste  to 
what  the  world  calls  "culture."  Doubtless 
every  one,  at  some  time  in  life,  has  encountered 
the  pathos  of  a  shabby-genteel  family,  which 
has  sent  a  daughter  "abroad  to  study  music." 
The  fatuous  pride  of  it!  The  blighting  self- 
denials!  The  cankering  emptiness  of  the  ex- 
istence hungry  for  the  clapping  of  hands 
around  a  lady's  performance  at  the  piano! 
"Home"  to  the  American  woman  has  come  to 
mean  simply  a  parlor  with  a  piano.  Without 
this  setting  there  is  no  place  for  her,  it  seems, 
except  the  streets;  and  yet  her  presence  in  the 
parlor  is  actually  more  injurious  to  the  human 
race  than  on  the  streets.  On  the  streets  there 
is,  at  least,  the  open  air,  the  widening  skies, 
humanity  in  its  heart-tugging  democratic  ap- 
peal, and  the  loss  of  one's  own  overswollen 
identity.  But  in  the  parlor  with  its  presiding 
piano,  there  is  unwholesome  narrowness,  hot- 
house snobbery,  the  "holier  than  thou"  of  man's 
perverted  sense  of  culture — a  little  cage  for 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       27 

the  dwarfed  breeding  of  the  three  Fatalities: 
Melomania,  Megalomania,  and  Mammon. 
It  is  the  lady-soloist  and  not  the  woman- 
suffragist  upon  whom  the  male-critics  should 
direct  their  militant  attacks,  for  she  is  indeed 
the  real  destroyer  of  human  nobility  and  the 
high  ideals  of  the  home. 

And  upon  our  Upper  Ten,  the  Four  Hun- 
dred, the  Smart  Set,  the  Purse-Proud  and 
Culture- Cultists,  our  musical  culture  does  not 
set  more  admirably  than  upon  the  aspiring 
masses.  They  place  a  high  value  upon  it  be- 
cause it  supplies  a  mode  for  self-distinction 
from  their  neighbors.  One  must  work  for  dis- 
tinction in  all  other  fields  of  human  ambition, 
but  the  distinguished  appearance  of  musical 
culture  can  be  purchased.  Thus  we  see  it  in 
New  York  favored  by  all  our  plutocratic 
Pomp,  the  opera  house  serving  as  a  public 
Treasury,  and  society  therein  in  the  smug  com- 
placency of  a  Masonic  Order  that  possesses 
signs  and  symbols  for  separating  the  sheep 
from  the  goats,  the  perfumed  from  the  great 
unwashed  and  the  cultured  from  the  great 
uncultured.  In  time  to  come,  the  Horse- 


28        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

shoe  of  our  own  Metropolitan  Opera  House 
may  be  depicted  as  the  first  circle  of  the 
Sin  of  Snobbery  in  the  Inferno  of  the  twen- 
tieth century  that  will  be  written  by  some 
future  Dante.  Snobbery  is  in  the  individ- 
ual what  nationalism  is  in  a  race.  It  be- 
gins in  ignorance,  egoism,  arrogance,  and 
ends  in  the  lust  for  conquest  and  "Self  over 
all."  So  far  our  snobbery  has  not  spread  be- 
yond the  individual  into  a  rapacious  spread- 
eagleism  of  the  nation,  like  the  winged  pow- 
ers of  darkness  that  have  sprung  from  the 
snobbish  souls  of  the  Europe'an  nations  now 
at  war.  For  the  triple-extract  of  American 
snobbery  is  concentrated,  as  yet,  within  the 
lorgnetted  spaces  of  the  opera-box  of  our  best 
society.  Without  the  opera  box,  New  York 
society  would  possess  no  real  standards  of  suc- 
cess, no  positive  test  for  proving  the  worth  of 
the  individual,  or  the  location  of  that  elusive 
quantity  called  social  position.  The  opera  box 
supplies  the  ground  for  society's  exhibitionism, 
culture's  pageantry,  and  is  the  voting  booth  of 
social  candidature.  Tiaras  and  music,  dia- 
monds and  culture,  low-necks,  swell-heads  and 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       29 

high-brows,  are  all  mixed  up  together  in  our 
ideas  of  what  constitutes  the  quality  of  the 
"best  people"  of  America;  and  since  we  can- 
not find  their  embodiments  for  ourselves — we 
are  too  democratic  to  discriminate! — we  go  to 
the  Opera  and  gaze  up  at  the  dazzling  Wag- 
nerians  in  their  Luck's  Horseshoe  of  boxes, 
as  at  the  archtypes  in  an  earthly  Paradise. 
The  first  tier  of  opera  boxes  represents  the 
musically  cultured  who  compose  New  York 
society ;  the  second  tier  represents  the  musically 
cultured  who  have  arrived  in  society;  the  third 
tier  represents  the  musically  cultured  who  are 
about  to  arrive  in  society.  Thus  we  see  that 
the  best  society  of  our  Empire  State  is  made 
up  of  three  public  tiers  (and  oceans  of  private 
ones  shed  by  the  musically  inclined  American 
lady)  much  as  our  "real  thing"  in  aristocratic 
breeding  is  said  to  be  made  by  three  genera- 
tions of  aspiration. 

But  there  are  a  few  over-looked  nonde- 
scripts, like  myself,  in  America,  who  possess 
no  musical  culture,  instinctive  or  acquired,  and 
we  have  begun  to  tremble  with  fear  before  the 
growing  formidability  of  .culture.  A  Great 


30        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

War  of  Culture  already  upon  us !  And  we  are 
informed  by  Germany,  with  all  her  academic 
and  bellicose  might,  that  culture  is  a  matter  of 
force  and  not  of  growth  as  we  had  believed  it 
to  be  once,  when  we  admired,  respected  and 
trusted  it. 

Now  I  have  heard  of  only  one  case  in  which 
musical  culture  was  brought  about  by  the  proc- 
esses of  brute  force,  the  case  of  Ludwig  von 
Beethoven.  A  biographer  informs  us  that  in 
his  early  youth  Beethoven  showed  a  strong 
aversion  to  music  and  that  his  father  used  to 
beat  him  to  make  him  study  and  practice  on 
the  piano — with  the  illustrious  success  known 
to  all.  Beethoven  was  a  German;  and  from 
this  instance  one  might  infer  that  culture  can 
be  beaten  into  the  Teutonic  race.  Therefore 
we  must  not  blame  the  Germans  too  severely 
for  their  1914  crusade  to  beat  culture  into  the 
rest  of  the  world. 

Nevertheless,  to  me — and  the  countless  un- 
cultured of  my  kind  that  happen  to  dwell  in 
this  Land  of  Liberty — the  prospect  before  us 
of  more  musical  culture  to  be  driven  in  with 
the  whole  German  army  behind  it,  is  one  to 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       31 

appall  the  imagination.  I  can  conceive  of  no 
fate  more  distressing  than  a  compulsory  at- 
tendance at  operas,  concerts  and  piano-recitals, 
such  as  we  would  have  under  Prussian  rule. 
And  to  live  in  an  atmosphere  where  the  social 
pressure  made  it  the  sign  and  manual  of  good- 
form,  to  pledge  one's  soul  to  Wagnerism, 
would  be  as  intolerable  as  to  live  in  a  land 
where  Es  ist  Verboten  to  publicly  express  one's 
private  opinion  of  the  Kaiser.  But  such  a 
future  we  now  have  to  face. 

Music,  canonized,  worshipped,  sanctified — 
society  formed  of  its  gaudy  priests  and  bleat- 
ing laity — its  heretics  damned  to  secret  tor- 
tures— tortures  adapted  to  the  modern  mind 
of  man  with  the  refined  deviltry  of  the  In- 
quisitorial tortures  once  adapted  to  the  ancient 
body  of  man:  The  horrification  of  the  pros- 
pect! The  goose-flesh  of  the  very  idea!  I 
shudder  and  perspire  as  though  in  the  future 
throes  of  Wagnerism  as  my  imagination  con- 
ceives it. 

Even  as  conditions  now  exist  in  still  free 
America,  there  is  a  plague  of  music  that  is 
difficult  for  peace-lovers  to  escape.  Much  ill- 


32        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

health,  and  therefore  crime,  can  be  traced  to 
its  inescap ability.  In  this  morning's  paper  I 
read  the  headlines  "Murder  and  Suicide 
Caused  by  a  Hymn"  which  tells  of  a  man, 
Joseph  Sellars  by  name,  who  shot  his  wife, 
son  and  himself  because  enraged  by  the  hymn- 
singing  of  his  daughter.  Without  a  doubt, 
the  practising  of  vocal  scales,  and  the  music 
of  phonographs  and  Hurdy-Gurdies  are  re- 
sponsible for  much  of  the  crime  that  occurs  in 
urban  population;  for  they  most  subtly  reach 
and  stir  both  the  homicidal  and  suicidal  im- 
pulses of  man.  In  a  realistic  drama  of  New 
York  life,  "The  Easiest  Way,"  a  Hurdy- 
Gurdy  plays  a  part  that  is  significant.  While 
the  heroine  lies  sobbing  upon  her  frugal  bed 
in  a  paroxysm  of  choice  between  the  good  and 
the  bad — a  Hurdy-Gurdy,  outside,  starts  up 
its  Festival  airs,  and  the  lady  chooses  the  easi- 
est way.  We  New  Yorkers  all  suffer  from 
indigestion  of  the  nerves — caused  by  the  mel- 
odic din  of  restaurant  life  as  much  as  by  their 
overseasoned  repasts.  Noise,  laughter,  chat- 
ter, and  music!  They  are  all  so  fashionable 
because  they  express  vitality,  juvenality,  red- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       33 

blood,  Nietzschism,  and  the  faith  of  the  heir 
of  Wagner.  These  are  the  molding  admira- 
tions of  our  modern  minds  and  they  have 
brought  us  the  culture  of  noise.  In  our  cul- 
tured society,  the  noisiest  entertainment  is  con- 
sidered the  most  successful,  the  noisiest  hostess 
is  the  most  courted,  the  noisiest  orator  is  the 
most  convincing,  and  the  noisiest  celebrity  in 
the  arts  is  the  most  popular.  When  a  lady 
wishes  to  entice  a  crowd — or  some  of  the  tired 
business  men — to  her  afternoon  tea  or  social 
function,  she  writes  "music"  in  a  corner  of  the 
invitation  card.  The  promise  of  "music"  is 
equivalent  to  a  promise  that  there  will  be  no 
conversation,  no  exchange  of  ideas,  no  neces- 
sity for  the  play  or  expression  of  personality. 
Music  reduces  the  social  world  to  a  state  of 
quacking  clappers,  cottening  to  the  wee  gods 
of  the  hour. 

In  recent  years  the  American  people  have 
become  so  affected  by  the  music-craze,  our 
nerves  have  become  so  morbid,  our  brains  so 
emptied,  our  will-to-live  so  played  upon,  that 
nature  has  inspired  us  to  seek  a  cure  in  the 
dance-craze.  The  dance-craze  is  nature's  way 


34        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

of  ridding  the  human  system  of  the  poison  of 
the  music-craze.  Movement  is  the  effort  of 
health  to  throw  off  the  affections  of  the  rnind. 
Henry  James  cautions  us  against  the  mental 
effects  of  music  with  this  advice,  "Never  to 
suffer  one's  self  to  have  an  emotion  at  a  con- 
cert without  expressing  it  afterwards  in  some 
actual  way." 

In  the  Middle  Ages,  Italy  held  the  supreme 
place  in  musical  culture  among  nations.  "The 
Italians  no  longer  think  now  that  they  sing  so 
well,"  wrote  Voltaire  of  them.  And  in  the 
heyday  of  Italy's  musical  glory,  a  strange  mal- 
ady broke  out  among  the  Italian  people  to 
which  was  given  the  name  of  the  Tarantulle. 
It  affected  its  victims  with  convulsions  of  the 
limbs  which  made  them  dance  with  frenzy  un- 
til they  fell  exhausted  or  dead.  An  homeo- 
pathic cure  was  then  discovered.  Music  itself 
was  found  to  cure  these  victims  of  music,  and 
thereafter  troupes  of  itinerant  musicians  went 
through  the  Italian  villages  offering  their  cure 
for  the  stricken  ones.  Those  old  Italian  tunes 
played  then — quick  in  rhythm  and  Bacchic 
as  the  Phrygian  airs  that  Aristotle  wished  ex- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       35 

eluded  from  the  Ideal  Republic — still  retain 
the  name  of  the  malady  they  were  designed  to 
cure,  the  Tarantulle. 

In  modern  times  we  have  found  another 
therapeutic  use  for  music.  Alienists  employ 
it  in  Insane  Asylums  as  a  cure  for  certain 
forms  of  psychic  malady  such  as  hysteria, 
epilepsy  and  convulsions.  The  insane  are 
greatly  affected  by  music.  It  calms  the  vio- 
lent, stirs  the  imbecile,  and  exalts  the  melan- 
cholic. In  fact,  only  upon  the  deranged  does 
it  seem  to  exert  an  altogether  wholesome  and 
beneficial  influence. 

Perhaps  the  time  will  come,  in  a  more  sane 
and  kindly  world,  when  music  will  be  restricted 
to  this  medical  use.  John  Stuart  Mill  ex- 
pressed his  belief  that  the  time  would  come 
when  musical  creativeness  would  be  extin- 
guished in  humanity.  A  higher  humanity, 
this  would  be,  we  may  be  sure,  a  humanity  be- 
yond all  lures  of  melomania,  megalomania, 
mammon  and  militarism. 

Napoleon  discovered  the  militant  value  in 
music  and  doubtless  the  Kaiser  has  learned 
this  also  from  the  superman  he  has  sought  to 


36        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

emulate.  Napoleon  once  wrote  from  Milan 
to  the  Inspecteurs  du  Conservatoire,  who  had 
charged  him  to  copy  the  music  of  Italy:  "Of 
all  the  fine  arts,  music  is  that  which  has  the 
most  influence  upon  the  passions,  and  is  that 
which  the  Law  ought  to  encourage  the  most." 
Napoleon,  it  seems,  believed  musical  culture 
could  be  achieved  through  Legislatures  just 
as  the  Kaiser  believed  it  could  be  achieved 
through  Armaments. 

There  is  another  element  in  the  psychology 
of  music  which  cannot  be  ignored,  the  sex- 
element.  This  has  always  been  found  out  by 
the  professional  sleuths  of  sex  such  as  the  Puri- 
tans, the  Clergy,  the  Comstocks  and  the  Men- 
tal Alienists;  but  the  normal  human  being  is 
too  apt  to  ignore  it  wholly  and  to  recognize, 
in  music  only  a  heavenly  appeal  to  the  divine 
in  man.  He  is  apt  to  be  too  vain  of  his  pro- 
ficiency in  musical  appreciation.  He  declares 
it  is  so  "spiritual"  or  "intellectual"  and  feels 
chastened  and  exalted  after  he  goes  through 
the  music-loving  process  which  has  made  him 
dream  of  angels. 

But  the  Moralists  have  always  objected  with 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       37 

violence  to  any  kind  of  Paradise  on  earth  which 
man  might  construct  for  himself  in  spirit  or 
senses.  Therefore  music  fell  under  the  vi- 
ciously virtuous  ban  when  the  moral-mongers 
discovered  there  was  pleasure  in  it  and  that  it 
was  potent  with  the  anathema,  Sex.  When 
the  Puritans  ascended  to  power  in  England  in 
the  seventeenth  century,  one  of  their  first  acts 
was  an  attempt  to  silence  the  music  that  had 
made  the  Tudor  period  so  vital  and  gay. 
They  even  denounced  Church-music  and  once 
destroyed  the  organ  of  Westminster  Abbey 
as  a  source  of  corruption  to  the  soul  of  man. 

It  is  certain  that  if  the  case  of  Morality 
versus  Music  could  have  been  presented  in 
words  instead  of  emotions  during  those  days 
of  man's  militant  morality  and  religion,  it 
would  have  been  silenced,  completely,  long 
ago.  One  can  imagine  the  mute  indignation 
excited  in  the  breast  of  sacerdotal  man  when 
he  experienced,  all  involuntarily — the  mystic 
lures,  and  voluptuous  titillations  and  savage 
thrills — awakened  by  the  uncensored,  secular 
music  of  the  day.  The  Church  did  the  best  it 
could  for  music  and  morality  by  making  its 


38        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

singers  eunuchs — but  music  seems  to  exist  in 
the  inextinguishable  nature  of  things,  for  it 
has  gone  on  developing  its  art  surpassingly, 
in  spite  of  all  the  ancient  Celibates  and  modern 
Censors. 

Biologically,  music  is  the  art  of  the  male. 
Noise  and  combat  are  the  two  sex-qualifica- 
tions of  the  male,  as  sympathy  and  service  are 
the  two  sex-qualifications  of  the  female.  Thus 
to  make  music  and  to  make  war  are  closely 
related  in  the  primal  instinct  of  the  male-or- 
ganism in  a  world  that  still  depends  upon 
courtship  and  conquest  for  the  preservation 
of  the  species.  Twentieth  century  humanity 
is  seen  in  Europe,  to-day,  in  a  supreme  tri- 
umph of  music,  war  and  maleness. 

Musicians,  singers  and  orators  are  invariably 
over-sexed  beings.  Ideal  lovers,  romantic 
strayers,  supersensualists.  That  is  why  their 
private  conduct  so  often  affords  a  subject  for 
public  scandal  or  reprobation.  It  has  been  ob- 
served before  that  the  woman  who  is  endowed 
with  musical-genius,  reveals  certain  stigmata 
of  the  male  in  her  organism,  mental  or  phys- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       39 

ical,  and  therefore  she  can  be  considered  an 
abnormal  woman.  But  the  normal  woman — 
without  exception — possesses  a  susceptibility 
to  sound,  just  as  the  normal  man  possesses  a 
gift  for  sound,  which  it  is  useful  to  remember 
when  we  consider  some  of  the  many  psycholog- 
ical mysteries  of  the  sexes. 

Modern  music  is  woman's  favorite  refuge 
from  the  cages  and  censorships  of  woman's 
existence.  The  prude,  the  mismated  and  the 
imaginative  fly  to  it — for  in  its  wild  waves 
they  find  a  little  exercise  for  their  poor  little 
emotional  wings.  In  the  Kreutzer  Sonata, 
Tolstoi  expresses  his  opinion  that  music  is  "the 
most  refined  lust  of  the  senses."  Cultured 
woman,  therefore,  is  its  devotee.  During  the 
ages,  woman  has  been  made  to  believe  that  she 
could  achieve  "refinement"  only  by  the  sacri- 
fice of  her  senses,  but  through  music  woman 
recovers  her  elementary  soundness  again.  As 
nature  intended,  music  has  a  sexual  effect  on 
woman  in  inspiring  her  with  a  sense  of  rap- 
turous surrender,  with  a  Saint  Theresa-like 
connubiality  with  the  Divine;  and  upon  man, 


40        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

also,  it  has  a  sexual  effect,  the  dynamic  effect 
— electrifying  him  with  sound  and  fury,  with 
creativeness  and  destruction. 

It  is  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world  for 
a  woman  to  fall  in  love  with  a  musician,  a 
singer,  an  orator,  or  merely  a  good-talker. 
This,  woman  constantly  does,  though  it  never 
ceases  to  puzzle  mere  man.  And  woman  re- 
veals her  biological  weakness  for  sound  in 
every  sincere,  realistic  novel  she  has  ever  writ- 
ten. Invariably  the  authoress  describes,  with 
eloquence,  the  voice  of  the  hero  of  her  romance ; 
for  every  woman  knows  that  nothing  affects 
her  whole  being  so  overpoweringly  as  the  voice 
of  the  man  she  loves.  The  defects  of  the  voice 
of  the  American  man  accounts  largely  for  his 
lack  of  attraction  for  the  American  woman; 
that  is,  in  comparison  to  the  attraction  that 
the  more  sexually  voiced  foreigner  possesses 
for  her.  I  believe  it  was  Grant  Allen  who 
remarked  somewhere — the  exact  words  I  do 
not  recall — that  a  woman  could  resist  a  man's 
genius,  a  man's  looks,  a  man's  money,  could 
resist  everything,  in  short,  except  a  man's 
voice.  Our  Mother  Eve  was  not  really  se- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       41 

duced  by  the  lure  of  the  apple,  but  by  the  al- 
lurement offered  in  the  man's  voice  of  the  ser- 
pent. 

As  soon  as  we  understand  this  human  sci- 
ence within  music,  it  becomes  clear  that  the 
musical  sense  should  not  receive  any  more  es- 
teem or  homage  than  is  accorded  to  any  other 
process  of  nature.  Music  possesses  no  appeal 
to  the  intellect — the  morals — the  ideals- — or  the 
spirituality  of  mankind.  Its  affinities  are 
solely  for  the  Will-to-Live  of  the  species. 

The  sincere  enjoyment  of  music  represents 
but  a  transitional  stage  in  human  evolution, 
and  depends  upon  the  existence  of  a  certain 
degree  of  savagery  or  refined  sadism  in  the 
spirit  of  the  music-lover.  Thus  the  music- 
lover  can  be  said  to  be  atavistic  or  degenerate. 
Music  expresses  the  sounds  of  human  sensibil- 
ity— the  sighs  and  struggles  and  sorrows  and 
lusts  and  dreams  of  the  human  species — and 
to  be  able  really  to  enjoy  their  intensely  mov- 
ing appeal  one  must  possess  the  constitution 
of  a  savage  or  a  Marquis  de  Sade. 

Music  is  too  human,  too  terribly  human  to 
enjoy.  It  is  the  voice  of  humanity  itself  cry- 


42        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ing  in  the  wilderness  of  the  Infinite.  A  deeply 
sympathetic  and  spiritualized  nature,  a  nature 
that  has  transcended  sex  and  become  aware  of 
the  inarticulate  touch  of  the  Omniscient — can- 
not experience  so-called  enjoyment  of  music. 
We  know  nothing  of  Heaven  except  its  Si- 
lence, and  we  must  believe  in  God  as  a  Deaf- 
mute. 

To  step  from  the  sublime  to  the  ludicrous, 
it  is  significant  to  note  here  that  the  only  ani- 
mal which  has  developed  a  soul  and  possesses 
sympathy  for  mankind — the  dog — cannot  bear 
music.  The  dog  is  said  to  possess  a  sixth- 
sense,  so  sensitized  is  he  to  many  intangible 
influences  that  are  unknown  to  the  senses  of 
man.  The  dog  dislikes  music.  In  the  home 
he  frequently  reveals  his  wounded  sensibilities 
by  howling  at  the  pianist  or  vocalist.  The 
dog  is  the  best  friend  of  man. 

The  noise  that  delights  the  child  annoys  the 
adult;  the  music  that  gives  pleasure  to  the  un- 
cultured adult  annoys  the  cultured  adult.  It 
requires  a  finer  sensibility  to  dislike  music  than 
to  like  it.  Even  Wagnerism  appears  to  be  a 
step  further  on  towards  the  beatitude  of  si- 


OUR  MUSICAL  CULTURE       43 

lence,  for  many  music-lovers  have  said  that 
after  they  learned  to  understand  and  to  enjoy 
Wagner  all  other  music  became  unbearable  to 
them. 

Many  men  of  genius  have  found  music  dis- 
agreeable, or  even  dangerous  to  themselves. 
Darwin,  Doctor  Samuel  Johnson,  Victor 
Hugo,  Carlyle,  Theophile  Gautier,  Flaubert, 
Dumas  fils  the  De  Goncourts,  Zola,  and  many 
other  great  writers  and  artists  have  confessed 
to  a  constitutional  antipathy  to  music.  "Mu- 
sic," said  Bill  Nye,  "is  merely  expensive  noise." 
Schopenhauer  often  mentions  his  hatred  of 
noise;  De  Musset,  Carlyle  and  Flaubert  lived 
in  the  country  in  order  to  escape  the  noise  of 
the  city;  and  Johnson  wrote  of  music  that  it 
was  merely  the  least  disagreeable  of  noises. 
Bobby  Burns  could  not  distinguish  one  tune 
from  another;  and  to  Walter  Scott  music  was 
but  "a  babble  of  confused  sounds."  Pierre  de 
Coulevain  confessed  in  one  of  her  charming 
self -revelations  that  music  never  pleased  her 
except  when  it  stopped. 

Berlioz  has  described  the  effect  of  music 
upon  himself:  "first  a  sense  of  voluptuous 


44        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ecstasy,  immediately  followed  by  general  agi- 
tation with  palpitation,  oppression,  sobbing, 
trembling,  sometimes  terminating  with  a  kind 
of  fainting  fit."  Maliban  fell  in  a  convulsive 
fit  on  first  hearing  Beethoven's  symphony  in  C 
minor.  Beethoven  is  responsible  also  for  a 
similar  effect  upon  Richard  Wagner.  "I 
hardly  know,"  wrote  Wagner,  "for  what  I  was 
originally  intended.  I  only  know  that  I  heard 
one  evening  a  symphony  of  Beethoven's,  that  I 
thereupon  fell  ill  of  a  fever,  and  that  when  I 
recovered  I  was — a  musician!" 

To  conclude  this  study  of  our  musical  cul- 
ture, it  seems  best  to  summarize  it  in  a  simple 
definition  as — an  erotico-religious-dementia- 
praecox,  a  disease  of  the  soldiers  and  the  snobs 
of  our  man-made  structure  of  modern  society. 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE 

IF  materialism  is  the  sin  of  the  age,  it  can  be 
traced  to  man's  materialization  of  mar- 
riage. 

Nature  endowed  sex  with  mysticism  in  order 
that  marriage  might  mean  a  sacred  consumma- 
tion of  two  lives  in  love.  But  our  civilized  sys- 
tem of  marriage  has  destroyed  the  mysticism 
of  sex  to  such  a  degree  that  it  has  destroyed 
with  it  the  deeper  impulses  of  love,  the  primal 
passion,  the  biological  imperative  of  the  mo- 
nogamous instinct  itself. 

The  statutes  of  the  law,  the  canons  of  the 
church,  the  conventions  of  society,  have  united 
their  forces  in  such  coercion  of  the  most  incor- 
rigible of  human  instincts,  that  the  instinct  has 
been  vitiated  into  strange  transmutations  of 
its  nature. 

One  feels  impelled  to  revert  to  the  beginning 
of  the  chain  of  culture  and  to  seek  to  discover 
in  more  elementary  forms  of  human  existence, 

45 


46        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  long  lost  secret  of  the  monogamous  instinct 
of  man. 

There  is  an  abundance  of  testimony  recorded 
in  the  natural  history  of  marriage  to  prove  that 
man  was  once  possessed  of  a  monogamous  in- 
stinct so  imperative  that  it  was  capable  of 
forming  life-long  unions  of  the  most  idealistic 
type,  actuated  solely  by  the  inward  impulse 
and  law  of  nature.  But  our  system  of  mar- 
riage has  completely  ignored  the  inwardness  of 
marriage — the  spirit  of  marriage — for  its  out- 
wardness, the  form,  appearance,  and  law  on 
marriage  until  it  should  not  be  surprising  to 
find  at  last  that  marriage  is  being  treated  as  an 
automatic  relation  and  a  depersonalized  state 
that  belongs  more  to  the  rights  of  the  com- 
munity than  to  the  individual. 

Nature  intended  that  marriage  should  be  the 
most  individualistic  of  human  acts.  Its 
natural  lure  was  the  quest  of  life-enhancement 
for  two  mystics  of  love  who  sought  a  nest  to- 
gether as  remote  as  possible  from  public  pry- 
ing and  concern,  the  primal  home — built  on  a 
covenant  of  Two,  on  a  collusion  for  the  ex- 
change of  the  secrets  of  Two,  a  conspiracy  of 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     47 

nature  against  the  peace  of  the  community,  for 
the  primal  passion  is  as  anarchistic  as  it  is  mys- 
tic. 

But  our  system  of  marriage  has  socialized 
marriage  as  well  as  materialized  it.  Therefore 
no  lure  to  marriage  exists  to-day  for  the  mys- 
tics of  love  that  will  bear  the  test  of  their  indi- 
vidualism: and  when  one  marries  it  is  rarely 
with  the  natural  ideal  of  the  nest  and  of  primal 
passion,  but  is  always  with  an  ideal  of  the  home 
as  sacred — simply  and  solely  because  the  com- 
munity has  pronounced  it  so. 

Community  life — both  with  animals  and 
man — develops  the  social  qualities  and  dead- 
ens the  personal  ones.  Thus  the  gregarious 
animals  have  become  the  polygamous  ones, 
and  the  cultivated  sociability  of  man  has  devel- 
oped in  his  nature  its  characteristic  sex-aberra- 
tions. The  trend  of  society  has  been  away 
from  individualism  towards  communism,  and 
therefore  away  from  the  influences  for  mo- 
nogamy to  the  influences  for  promiscuity.  It 
was  the  sensitive  individualism  of  the  primitive 
man  that  made  him  by  nature  a  monogamist; 
and  it  is  the  sensitive  communism  of  cultured 


48        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

man  that  has  made  him  by  nature  a  polygamist, 
by  pretence  a  monogamist,  and  consequently 
that  which  Christ  condemned  as  the  most  unre- 
generate  of  humankind,  the  hypocrite. 

Monogamy  was  the  common  state  in  primi- 
tive society  of  "the  lowest  people."  Many 
ethnographical  writers  have  agreed  upon  this 
now,  and  disproved  the  popular  idea  of  primi- 
tive promiscuity  and  communal  marriage  as  a 
theory  of  the  mythological  stage  of  human  in- 
telligence. In  primitive  society  promiscuity 
and  polygamy  were  the  exceptional  and  un- 
natural conditions  of  human  relations,  brought 
about  by  the  eventualities  of  war,  established 
female  subjection,  the  influence  of  alien  civ- 
ilization and  the  degeneracy  of  the  peoples. 
But  the  vast  majority  of  savages,  primitives 
and  barbarians  have  been  monogamous  when 
living  in  a  state  of  nature,  and  when,  in  later 
stages,  there  have  been  other  forms  of  mar- 
riage they  have  been  modified  in  a  monoga- 
mous direction.  Alfred  Russell  Wallace  says 
that  "The  savage  is  more  chaste,  more  moral 
and  more  normal  in  his  sexual  relations  than 
the  civilized  being."  Neither  celibacy  nor 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     49 

prostitution,  shame,  hypocrisy  nor  obscenity, 
were  factors  in  the  sex-life  of  the  primitive  be- 
ing. By  instinct  he  was  a  monogamist — like 
all  the  higher  primates — because  he  possessed 
the  natural  mysticism  of  sex  which  made  all 
sex  relations  and  processes  appear  religious  to 
him. 

Even  in  the  monogamous  animals,  one  can 
not  fail  to  recognize  that  the  mystic  or  psychic 
side  of  sex  is  as  essential  and  imperative  as  its 
physical  impulse.  Otherwise  one  could  not 
account  for  that  phenomenon  in  the  vast  ma- 
jority of  the  lower  orders  of  life,  in  which  gen- 
eration is  restricted  to  the  briefest  of  seasons 
and  yet  the  male  and  female  remain  together 
for  many  seasons  or  a  lifetime.  Westermarck 
thus  explains  animal  monogamy:  "The  tie 
which  joins  male  and  female  is  an  instinct  de- 
veloped through  the  powerful  influence  of 
natural  selection" 

But  there  were  other  influences,  more  pro- 
found and  complex,  that  once  preserved  the 
subtle  forces  of  the  monogamous  instinct  in 
man.  In  certain  studies  of  primitive  society 
—among  the  best  known  those  of  Wester- 


50        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

marck,  Frazer  and  Crawley — there  is  given  a 
fund  of  facts  about  primitive  customs  and 
ideas  regarding  sex  which  suggests  to  the  mind 
a  new  train  of  surmise  in  explanation  of  the 
failure  of  monogamy  in  the  higher  forms  of 
life. 

Obviously  the  monogamy  of  the  primitive  is 
explained  by  his  mystic  attitude  to  the  married 
relation,  but  the  means  by  which  he  sought  to 
preserve  the  spirit  of  marriage  have  been  over- 
looked in  their  significance  and  direction  for 
monogamy  in  civilization.  The  atmosphere 
deemed  essential  by  the  natural  man — as  inti- 
mated by  all  his  ways  and  ideas  and  customs — 
for  the  spirit  of  marriage,  was  one  of  secrecy, 
strangeness  and  sanctity.  The  primitive  re- 
garded his  person  as  sacred,  hence  the  most 
personal  of  the  relations  of  life  became  sacred 
to  him  in  a  way  that  makes  its  "sacredness,"  as 
exploited  by  modern  society,  a  word  of  mock- 
ery. In  his  desire  to  keep  the  married  rela- 
tion sacred  and  apart  from  all  other  relations, 
social,  domestic,  and  material,  there  was  prac- 
tised in  relatively  all  the  monogamous  races  a 
more  or  less  elaborate  system  of  suspension  of 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     51 

marital  rights,  of  taboos  in  the  common  home 
life,  and  of  periodic  separations  of  husband 
and  wife — sometimes  extending  over  the  space 
of  three  or  four  years — which  was  observed 
with  a  religious  and  mystical  scrupulosity. 
They  preserved  the  "purity  of  home"  by  a  sys- 
tem of  prohibitions  against  the  marital  rela- 
tion taking  place  within  its  precincts.  Gener- 
ally "the  rendezvous  between  husband  and  wife 
are  arranged  in  the  depths  of  the  forest  un- 
known to  any  but  the  two,"  says  Ernest  Craw- 
ley,  and  giving  accumulate  instances  of  this 
custom  he  adds:  "This  principle  can  be 
traced  right  down  to  the  lower  animals." 

The  well  known  eugenic  experiments  of 
Sparta  adopted  this  principle  for  marriage, 
and  every  married  couple  of  that  State  was 
enjoined  to  social  secrecy  of  their  union,  and 
husband  and  wife  were  forbidden  by  public 
sentiment  to  dwell  under  the  same  roof. 

Thus  the  cultivated  Greek  of  Sparta,  in  the 
eugenic  awakening  of  his  time,  became  one 
with  the  Fijian,  described  by  Wilkes  as  "the 
most  barbarous  and  savage  race  now  existing 
upon  the  globe,"  and  yet  "he  possesses  such  an 


52        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

idea  of  delicacy  in  his  sex  relations  that  he  does 
not  share  the  same  roof  with  his  wife  at  night." 
The  veil  of  modesty  and  mysticism  is  be- 
stowed by  the  child  of  nature  upon  that  which 
the  child  of  culture  calls  "sacred"  only  when 
it  is  familiar  and  vulgarized.  In  primitive  so- 
ciety the  life  in  common  of  husband  and  wife 
was  disapproved  of  to  such  a  degree  that  "not 
merely  is  the  intercourse  of  husband  and  wife 
not  practised  in  the  house,  but  even  the  per- 
formance of  ordinary  functions,  such  as  eating, 
is  prohibited  there  as  in  New  Zealand  and  the 
Sandwich  Islands."  Among  many  existed 
such  superstitions  and  ideas — that  lovers  and 
married  people  would  come  to  dislike  each 
other  by  eating  from  the  same  plate,  or  drink- 
ing from  one  glass  or  biting  the  same  piece  of 
bread,  and  all  such  functioning  together  in  the 
daily  material  life — that  most  of  them  feel  un- 
der the  taboo,  which  formed  the  primal 
etiquette  of  man.  The  taboo  created  an  ideal 
of  good  manners  in  the  home  life  of  the  primi- 
tive, but  our  civilized  marriage,  without  a 
taboo !  is  notorious  for  its  bad  manners  in  home 
life. 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     53 

But  the  mystic  ideal  of  the  primitive,  to  hold 
and  preserve  the  mating-passion  apart  and 
sacred  from  the  sordid  sacrilege  of  the  home, 
was  most  fully  expressed  in  his  gradually 
evolved  theory  of  Incest  and,  later,  in  the  cus- 
tom of  Exogomy  which  became  universal  in 
the  whole  uncivilized  world. 

Originally,  man,  like  the  animals,  had  no  in- 
stinctive aversion,  moral  prejudice  or  mental 
conception  of  that  which  we  term  "incest." 
The  original  meaning  of  "incest"  to  the  prim- 
itive was  "unchaste."  It  was  by  a  process  of 
associated  ideas  and  experience  that  there  grad- 
ually evolved  in  the  human  race  the  fixed  aver- 
sion to  consanguineous  marriage.  At  certain 
periods  it  has  been  practised  by  nearly  every 
race,  both  ancient  and  modern.  The  Egyp- 
tians and  Persians  sanctioned  marriage  be- 
tween brother  and  sister,  and  when  the  idea 
existed — mentioned  by  ^Eschylus — that  the 
mother  was  not  related  to  her  child,  incest  was 
habitually  practised  by  the  Arabs,  the  Jews, 
the  Peruvians  and  the  Greeks.  In  the  earliest 
stages  of  the  family  the  sex  relations  were  con- 
sanguineous. 


54        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

But  slowly  man  awakened  to  the  recognition 
of  a  certain  psychologic  effect  produced  in  him 
by  marriage  with  one  in  the  closeness  and  kin- 
ship of  family  life.  A  complex  feeling,  a  sub- 
conscious aversion  to  love  and  marriage  was 
realized  as  existing  between  the  male  and  fe- 
male who  had  been  raised  together  or  were  in 
continuous  contact  in  the  same  home.  Hence 
arose  the  convention  in  all  primitive  society 
that  "it  is  indecent  for  housemates  to  inter- 
marry." Upon  this  aversion  of  nature  was 
founded  the  primitive  theory  of  incest,  the 
primitive  practice  of  Exogamy  (marriage  with 
a  woman  foreign  to  the  clan,  tribe  or  locality) 
and  the  primitive  taboo  of  the  sexual  relation 
in  the  home.  The  primitive  observed  the  work- 
ings of  nature  to  guide  his  conduct  and  laws  of 
love  and  marriage,  and  as  a  mystical  mo- 
nogamist found  the  essential  lure  for  the  union 
of  the  sexes  and  the  glamour  of  the  life  of 
spirit  and  senses,  in  secretiveness,  strangeness 
and  sanctity. 

But  civilized  man  in  his  mania  to  cultivate 
monogamy — for  the  sake  of  woman ! — has  gone 
contrary  to  all  the  workings  of  nature,  so  pre- 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     55 

cious  and  binding  upon  the  monogamous  nat- 
ural man.  In  the  first  place,  our  civilized,  or 
pseudo- Christian  system  of  marriage,  has  been 
founded  upon  an  unnatural,  impossible  as- 
sumption, an  idealized  sham-miracle,  a  nega- 
tion of  the  person  in  love  and  marriage  itself, 
upon  the  Oneness  of  the  Spirit  and  the  Flesh 
of  the  Married! 

Whether  or  not  any  man  or  woman  has  ever 
been  stupid  enough  to  accept  this  doctrine  with 
the  faith  once  enjoined  for  a  similar  doctrine 
of  the  Eucharist,  it  has  actually  served  to  create 
an  attitude  to  marriage  which  permeates  the 
whole  institution  and  our  laws  and  customs 
even  to  this  contemporary  day  of  realism  in 
thought  and  literature.  One  part  of  the  ideal 
—the  Oneness  of  the  Spirit  of  the  Married — 
has  been  surrendered  as  unessential — since  too 
easily  disproved  in  the  divorce  court — but  the 
other  part — the  Oneness  of  the  Flesh  of  the 
Married — has  been  preserved  and  observed  in 
all  the  ritualisms  of  society  and  the  home. 

As  soon  as  a  man  and  woman  marry — per- 
haps propelled  by  the  primal  dream  of  home 
as  the  nest  of  seclusion  and  privacy — they  are 


56        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

at  once  thrust  into  a  realisation  of  the  appalling 
publicity  of  their  Home  Performance.  Public 
opinion  and  sentiment  of  the  sacred  are  imme- 
diately involved  in  the  existence  of  that  home, 
keenly  concerned  about  keeping  that  home  to- 
gether, regardless  of  the  will  or  fancies  of  its 
inmates.  The  System  and  Society  demand  of 
the  fated  ones  that  they  shall  perform  together 
in  this  home  all  the  imperative  functions  which 
create  the  appearance  and  results  of  marriage : 
s — eating  and  drinking  and  sleeping  and  breed- 
ing and  going  out  together,  always  together, 
the  Two  as  One,  an  eternal  Togetherness  with- 
out a  solitary  Taboo! 

Our  Home  performance  seems  deliberately 
designed  to  bring  about,  to  increase,  to  multi- 
ply and  to  sanctify,  that  which  was  most 
shunned  and  exorcised  from  the  marriage  re- 
lation by  the  primitive  being,  the  Aversion. 
The  aversion  of  nature  which  condemned  the 
state  in  which  it  existed  as  an  unholy,  unnat- 
ural, or  incestuous  union  of  primal  man  and 
woman. 

And  how  has  the  human  being  become  en- 
trenched in  such  a  state  of  life  against  all  the 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     57 

wholesome  instincts  of  human  nature?  One 
may  well  ask. 

The  sources  and  evolution  are  so  remote  and 
devious  that  it  supplies  but  a  crude  answer  to 
reply  as  one  must  that  the  most  striking  char- 
acteristics of  modern  marriage  have  been 
brought  about  by  the  mediaeval  ideals  and  Dog- 
matism of  Marriage. 

At  one  time  man  believed  in  martyrdom  as 
his  means  and  grace  of  personal  morality  and 
salvation.  In  the  Christian  era  of  human  evo- 
lution, man  was  so  intent  upon  making  him- 
self and  his  woman  miserable  in  this  mundane 
sphere,  that  he  accepted  the  ecclesiastical 
mind's  version  of  sex  and  turned  against  all 
the  values  of  life  which  nature  had  provided 
for  the  human  being  in  love  and  marriage. 
The  Church  pronounced  marriage  a  state  of 
sin.  For  twelve  long  centuries  the  Church 
thundered  against  the  sinfulness  of  marriage, 
just  as  it  now  thunders  against  the  sinfulness 
of  divorce.  Man,  a  religious  animal,  believed 
that  marriage  was  a  state  of  sin,  and  respected, 
accordingly,  only  celibacy.  Yet,  alas !  for  hu- 
man nature;  marriage  waxed  so  popular  with 


58        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

its  glamour  as  a  state  of  sin,  and  persisted  so 
defiantly  as  a  civil  contact,  dissoluble,  and  de- 
nounced by  the  ultra-Respectable  of  that  day 
— that  the  Church  finally  recognized  the  ex- 
pediency of  taking  under  its  control  a  state  it 
could  not  prevent,  and  thereupon  performed  a 
volte-face  and  issued  the  Dogma  of  marriage 
as  a  Sacrament. 

Thus  the  Church  obtained  its  absolutism  over 
the  most  vital  of  human  relations.  By  the  six- 
teenth century  the  Church  had  discovered  that 
here — in  marriage — was  one  ideal  mode  in  this 
world  for  man's  expiation  for  sex  and  for 
woman's  Eternal  Punishment.  As  the  result 
of  this  recognition — and  thus  tardily — the 
Church  bestowed  the  religious  ceremony  upon 
marriage,  the  Council  of  Trent  pronounced  it 
a  Divine  institution,  and  simultaneously  it  was 
secured  as  a  Divine  Martyrdom  by  the  pro- 
nouncement upon  it  of  the  Dogma  and  Law 
of  Indissolubility. 

Humanity  then  became  so  thoroughly  miser- 
able in  marriage  that  a  Martin  Luther  finally 
arose  for  its  deliverance  and  precipitated  the 
Reformation  in  his  undertaking  to  destroy  the 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     59 

false  idealism  and  sadistic  sacramentalism  that 
destroyed  human  happiness  in  marriage.  Suc- 
ceeding so  well,  indeed,  that  no  one  believes 
to-day  in  the  ecclesiastical  interpretation  of 
marriage,  either  as  a  state  of  sin  or  a  state  of 
holiness.  Marriage  at  last  stands  on  a  human 
basis,  unassailed  by  the  Powers  of  the  past, 
though  pervaded  still  with  the  past  ideals  of 
morality:  morality  as  martyrdom. 

Here  is  the  crux  of  the  modern  problem. 
The  issue  between  the  old  and  the  new  ideals 
of  life  and  of  what  constitutes  morality  in  mar- 
riage. The  old  ideal  of  life  made  the  virtues 
of  marriage  consist  in  the  qualities  of  endur- 
ance, abnegation,  self-suppression  and  self- 
sacrifice,  a  sort  of  vicarious  atonement  of  self 
to  the  species.  But  the  new  ideal  of  life  has 
made  the  virtues  of  marriage  consist  in  the 
qualities  of  love,  harmony,  self-fulfilment  and 
self-creation — as  the  only  values  in  marriage 
for  the  individual  or  the  race. 

The  new  morality  is  the  natural  morality, 
defined  once  by  Cicero  when  he  said  that  vir- 
tue was  but  nature  carried  out  to  its  utmost. 
To-day  it  has  come  into  our  life  and  thought 


60        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

because  of  the  sensitive  individualism  of  the 
highly  organized  modern  which  makes  him 
more  akin  to  the  savage  in  temperament  than 
to  the  civilized  being.  Extremes  can  meet; 
and  the  vantage  of  hope  in  civilization  to-day 
is  the  perception  that  worlds  of  culture  have 
passed  over  us  and  left  most  of  us  potentially 
primitive  still. 

The  best  of  humanity  are  now  more  prim- 
itive in  nature  than  Christianized.  Therefore 
mysticism  has  reappeared  in  our  needs  for  the 
human  relations,  sexual  and  social,  and  man 
and  woman  both  demand  in  marriage  that 
which  the  most  individualistic  of  modern  peo- 
ples, the  Americans,  endeavored  to  guarantee 
to  humanity  in  all  its  institutions — Life,  Lib- 
erty and  the  Pursuit  of  Happiness. 

Each  individual  marriage  must  survive  the 
test  of  this  standard,  to  survive  at  all,  but  the 
test  has  not  yet  been  applied  to  the  System  of 
Marriage,  which  stands  englamoured  by  tra- 
dition, and  supported  by  all  the  forces  of  con- 
temporary Phariseeism  even  in  the  New 
World.  But  the  day  is  coming  when  the 
Americans  will  apply  to  this  entrenched  system 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     61 

the  same  revolutionary  principles  of  the  Rights 
of  Man  with  which  they  once  upset  so  many 
other  Systems  just  as  rooted,  respectable  arid 
Roman. 

Already  the  practising  is  preceding  the 
preaching,  for  there  is  forming  in  our  midst 
the  silent  forerunners  of  what  has  been  prophe- 
sied as  the  "aristocracy  of  the  future,"  Celib- 
acy. Celibacy  has  again  become  an  ideal  as 
a  protest  against  the  sham  idealism  of  the  mar- 
riage system. 

A  few  months  ago  the  press  was  vociferous 
over  one  sign  of  this  social  phenomenon  as  re- 
vealed by  a  report  of  the  Census  that  in  the 
United  States  there  are  seventeen  million 
celibates,  of  the  matrimonially  desirable  age, 
and  in  the  number  an  excess  of  a  million  more 
female  celibates  than  male.  In  a  country 
where  there  is  still  a  preponderance  of  males 
this  seemed  unaccountable.  "Why  don't  they 
marry?"  became  a  popular  query,  and  removed 
the  musty  marriage  problem  from  the  closets 
of  the  Academics  and  the  cellars  of  the  An- 
archists into  the  open  discussion  of  democratic 
society. 


62        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

Social  observation  reveals  the  character  of 
this  growing  aristocracy  as  being  formed  of 
the  best  of  humanity,  the  gifted,  educated,  at- 
tractive and  spiritually  minded  of  the  Ameri- 
cans. If  not  celibates  in  actual  life,  they  are 
decidedly  so  in  principle.  Celibacy  appeals  to 
them  because  it  is  seen  in  the  glamour  of  an 
atmosphere  of  freedom,  and,  to  a  modern,  free- 
dom is  the  only  power  that  can  cast  a  glamour 
over  anything  to-day.  Once  marriage  was 
given  the  glamour  of  secrecy  by  the  primitive, 
once  it  was  given  the  glamour  of  sin  by  the 
Christian,  and  to-day  a  glamour  is  gathering 
about  Celibacy  as  a  Golden  Guild  composed  of 
the  workers,  charmers  and  mystics  in  modern 
life. 

Marriage,  divested  of  all  natural  morality, 
appears  to  these  aristocrats  as  the  supreme  im- 
morality. Marriage  has  become  immoral 
through  its  denial  of  the  spirit  and  worship  of 
the  letter  of  marriage;  immoral  through  its 
property  rights  over  person;  immoral  through 
its  sacrifice  of  the  sanctity  of  the  individual 
and  the  race  to  the  pseudo-sanctity  belonging 
to  a  mythical  thaumaturgy — a  lie,  which  if  true 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     63 

would  mean  but  a  miracle  of  consanguinity, 
converting  the  Two  of  Marriage  into  the  flesh 
and  bone  of  the  One  of  Incest. 

That  is  why,  when  a  man  marries,  it  is,  as  a 
rule,  from  the  outer  instead  of  the  inner  mo- 
tives and  promptings.  The  monogamous  in- 
stinct is  dead  or  degenerate  in  the  average  man, 
so  that  marriage  has  become  a  communal  act 
on  the  part  of  the  male.  The  common  motives 
that  prevail  with  a  man  are  the  material  ones, 
of  marriage  for  money  or  social  position,  for 
a  hostess  of  a  palace  or  a  housekeeper  for  a 
hovel,  for  a  stepmother  for  previous  offspring 
or  a  mother  for  desired  heirs,  for  a  personal  at- 
tendant in  invalidism  or  a  caretaker  for  old 
age — or  if  idealistic  and  a  supporter  of  the  Sys- 
tem, a  man  will  marry  merely  for  the  respecta- 
bility of  the  performance,  for  Home  as  man's 
visible  pledge  of  reform  and  landmark  of  the 
Family  Tie. 

At  the  present  time,  it  is  only  the  social 
idealism  of  the  home  that  enables  it  to  serve 
as  a  lure  to  marriage.  Formerly,  it  was 
frankly  materialized  and  the  old-fashioned  man 
used  to  marry  chiefly  for  the  creature  com- 


64        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

forts  of  home  life.  But  the  improvements  of 
club-life,  hotel-life  and  bachelor  apartments, 
have  changed  all  this,  and  no  man  marries  to- 
day for  the  superior  material  gratifications 
once  provided  by  the  separate  home.  Man 
now  desires  freedom  and  personal  rights  in  his 
private  existence  and  these  can  only  be  secured 
by  the  celibate  mode  of  existence.  The  press 
and  the  divorce  court  in  modern  life  have  sig- 
nally exposed  the  home  of  marriage  as  the  most 
public  of  all  institutions,  a  mere  housetop,  as 
it  were,  from  which  everything  that  takes  place 
therein  may  be  shouted  on  some  terrible,  ever 
possible  day. 

Man  has  become  too  mystical  and  individual- 
istic to  incur  with  deliberation  the  rough  ex- 
perience of  home  life.  Privacy  and  personal 
rights  are  a  mockery  in  the  typical  home  atmos- 
phere ;  an  atmosphere  deadening  to  life  with  its 
enforced  intimacies,  destructive  to  dreams  with 
its  cares  and  clamors  and  collisions  of  raw 
temperament.  To-day  no  bachelor  is  pitied, 
in  society,  for  his  homelessness  and  no  married 
man  is  pitied  for  his  childlessness.  To  ask  man 
to  support  this  home  by  the  sweat  of  his  brow 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     65 

is  demanding  from  his  nature  that  which  the 
home  has  destroyed,  the  primal  instincts.  The 
nest  has  ended  as  the  cage. 

Caged  animals,  as  every  naturalist  knovs, 
lose  the  wholesome  instincts  that  guided  them 
in  freedom  and  were  preservative  of  their  own 
life  and  that  of  their  race.  Thus  race-suicide 
and  the  perversion  of  instincts  become  nature's 
revenge  in  the  cage.  Apply  the  same  knowl- 
edge to  our  cage  homes  of  marriage,  and  it 
makes  comprehensible  the  modern  "aversion  to 
the  child" — a  familiar  comment — and  the 
strange  manners  and  morals  that  distinguish 
domesticated  life. 

Another  contributory  cause  to  man's  loss  of 
the  monogamous  instinct  through  marriage  is 
found  in  the  System's  ideal  of  the  Wife  of 
home.  Let  us  recall  that  monogamy  was  nat- 
ural to  man  only  when  he  expressed  both  sides 
of  his  sex  nature,  the  psychic  and  physical,  in 
a  love  marriage  with  another  human  being — 
a  human  being  ever  provocative  in  her  separ- 
ateness  and  freedom  to  escape! — and  it  makes 
comprehensible,  also,  why  the  ideal  Wife  and 
Mother — made  by  man  into  the  most  fixed,  se- 


66        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

cured  and  familiar  of  all  living  embodiments^ — 
is  ever  desired  as  a  part  of  the  idealism  of  the 
home,  but  rarely,  if  ever,  represents  the  per- 
sonal idealism  of  the  man  himself.  Therefore 
the  modern  male  takes  his  licensed-for-life 
marriage,  incidentally,  as  a  social  duty  at  its 
best,  and  desires  represented  therein  chiefly  the 
social  ideals. 

Man  respects  the  ideal  of  the  wife  too  sin- 
cerely and  solemnly  ever  to  entertain  for  her 
such  a  socially  damaging  thing  as  passion, 
primal  or  otherwise.  If  it  exists — as  it  does 
sometimes  in  certain  simple  naive  souls — suffi- 
ciently to  have  furnished  a  natural  motive  for 
the  stern  fatality  of  marriage,  it  is  soon  extin- 
guished by  the  atmosphere  of  the  home.  The 
monogamous  savage  loved  his  nest  for  its 
secretiveness,  loved  his  rendezvous  for  its 
strangeness,  loved  his  mate  for  her  foreign 
looks  and  ways,  for  her  little  taboos  and  mys- 
tery of  sacred  selfhood.  But  none  of  these 
primal  elements  are  garnered  into  the  atmos- 
phere of  the  home  for  the  safeguarding  of  the 
modern  male.  Marriage  is  the  licensed  viola- 
tion of  the  selfhood  of  man  and  woman. 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     67 

Everything  capricious,  charming  and  chary, 
the  coquetry  of  the  soul  itself  luring  man  on  to 
infinities  of  search — has  been  lost  in  marriage 
by  its  system  of  compulsion  for  making  Two 
live  in  the  gross  corporeality  of  One.  Man 
does  not  really  love  his  own  flesh  and  bones. 
His  whole  existence — from  the  beginning  of 
time — is  recorded  by  his  efforts  to  get  away 
from  the  materialism  of  himself  into  the  free- 
dom and  infinities  of  art  and  creation.  Surely 
the  initial  mistake  in  our  system  of  marriage 
was  the  rapt  cynicism  of  making  the  creative 
relation  of  man  a  Sacred  Consanguinity;  for 
nature  makes  incest  sterile. 

In  marriage  man  finds  not  his  mate  but  his 
housemate.  She  whom  the  savage  said  "it  is 
indecent  to  marry,"  she  who  lives  in  a  relation 
signifying  all  the  in-laws  and  blood-ties  and 
spiritual  consanguinities  to  her  housemate. 
Consequently  the  modern  man  as  husband  de- 
velops affection  for  his  wife  (she  symbolizes  so 
much  to  him!),  family  affection,  but  passion 
becomes  to  him  as  something — quite  outside  the 
family  circle. 

Family  life  has  degraded  the  primal  passion 


68        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

in  man.  In  the  purity  of  the  sacred  home  at- 
mosphere, he  develops  a  positive  aversion. 
The  very  word  "passion"  comes  to  shock  pater- 
familias and  all  the  impurity  that  mediaeval- 
ism  attached  to  sex,  flourishes  in  the  thoughts 
of  the  family  circle,  so  that  the  marital  relation 
therein  appears  as  something  incredible  and 
indecent,  a  relation  for  a  gumshoeing  obscen- 
ity. 

It  is  necessary  to  note  that  the  recent  ex- 
posures to  the  family  circle  of  the  existence 
of  the  Social  Evil  outside  their  door,  also  in- 
formed them  of  the  amazing  fact  that  the 
clientele  of  the  social  evil  is  chiefly  composed 
of  the  married  man,  and  the  man  of  position 
and  family. 

It  is  fortunate  for  the  System  that  the  mar- 
ried man  soon  loses  all  desire  for  his  mate  in 
captivity.  In  this  way  the  home  atmosphere 
is  rendered  virtually  sexless  and  "pure,"  and 
as  the  type  of  woman  chosen  by  sophisticated 
man  for  the  ideal  wife  is  usually  the  woman  of 
sexual  anaesthesia  (another  pathological  result 
of  civilization)  this  enables  the  Family  Life 
to  be  honest,  at  least,  in  what  it  pretends  to  be, 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     69 

a  Symbol  of  Social  Purity,  a  public  monument 
to  the  Monogamy  of  Man. 

As  such  it  has  become  more  compatible  to 
the  acquired  tastes  of  modern  man  than  to  those 
of  woman.  Woman,  more  primitive,  is  less 
satisfied  with  the  objective  material  side  of 
marriage  and  regards  it  with  the  feminine  view- 
point, subjectively.  With  man,  more  civilized, 
hence  more  mechanical  in  his  relations  than 
woman — the  natural  impulses  for  the  married 
relation  are  no  longer  essential.  In  fact  mar- 
riage most  amply  gratifies  some  of  his  culti- 
vated instincts,  the  communal  and  proprietorial 
instincts,  for  instance.  And  therein  consists 
its  hold  on  the  nature  of  man  to-day.  Unde- 
niably it  has  a  hold,  unreasoning,  blind  and 
mysterious  as  instinct.  Statistics  prove  it. 
In  Bailey's  book,  "Modern  Social  Condi- 
tions," he  gives  these  figures  of  the  matri- 
moniality  of  men  and  women,  according  to 
Canderlier's  method  of  computation,  and 
taken  from  a  representative  State  of  the 
United  States  where  the  sexes  are  about 
equally  distributed:  "There  are  nearly  a 
thousand  more  females  than  males  marrying 


70        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

for  the  first  time"  but  "73  widowers  and  di- 
vorced males  remarry  to  15  widows  and  di- 
vorcees" and  "more  than  twice  as  many  men 
as  women  are  contracting  a  third  marriage 
and  more  than  five  times  as  many  a  fourth." 

Conclusively,  these  statistics  show  how  the 
system  and  appearances  of  marriage  survive 
with  man — as  a  habit. 

Woman  is  less  easily  explained  in  her  new 
aristocracy  of  celibacy.  We  have  been  told 
for  so  long  that  marriage  was  made  for  woman, 
that  it  was  her  boon  and  bonanza,  her  Glory, 
her  only  excuse  for  living  and  her  arch-per- 
formance for  the  sake  of  the  permanency  of  the 
human  race,  that  it  is  curious  and  inexplicable 
to  find  her  now  deserting  her  smug  sphere  with 
her  very  first  breath  of  freedom. 

But  the  world  has  always  had  its  suspicions 
about  woman  in  relation  to  its  System  of  mar- 
riage. So  much  so,  indeed,  so  profoundly  dis- 
trustful have  been  all  the  Powers  of  civiliza- 
tion, State,  Church  and  Society,  that  they  have 
conspired  with  superb  success  to  hold  woman 
in  her  natural  place — without  a  glimmering 
chance  for  the  wantonness  of  escape. 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     71 

Surely  it  is  stale  and  superfluous  in  these 
plethoric  days  of  feminism  to  review  the  many 
methods  once  employed  by  the  system  for  the 
coercion  of  the  female  to  marriage  and  for  her 
captivity  therein.  The  old  ways  and  means 
are  familiarly  known  now;  the  closing  of 
careers,  professions,  the  higher  education,  the 
social  taboos  on  the  old  maid  and  the  free 
woman,  and  the  myriad  forms  of  convention 
and  ban  and  suspicion  of  the  original  sin  of 
womanhood  which  made  woman  so  pre-em- 
inently the  husband-hunter,  the  match-maker, 
the  woman  of  marriage  in  the  past. 

And  having  secured  her  successfully  as  the 
woman  of  marriage,  society  proceeded  to  make 
her  pay  a  price  for  the  privileges  of  matrimony 
that  would  have  been  fatal  to  the  system  to 
have  exacted  from  the  male.  She  paid  with 
the  surrender  of  her  name,  domicile,  fortune 
and  human  right  to  wage,  she  paid  with  her 
free-will  of  person  in  marriage  and  maternity, 
she  paid  with  the  entire  personality  of  woman, 
in  short,  for  the  marriage  of  the  past,  in  which 
the  female  of  the  species  was  forced  to  exist 
as  an  insensible  machine  of  procreation  for  the 


72        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

supporters  of  the  system.  In  the  sacred  name 
of  Marriage,  woman  has  been  made  to  exist 
as  a  human  being  without  the  human  rights  of 
will,  freedom  and  experience,  to  live  as  a  wife 
without  the  passion  or  senses  of  a  wife,  to  be- 
come a  mother  without  the  desire  or  dream  of 
the  child,  to  remain  forever  the  senseless  mar- 
tinet of  the  cage  that  symbolizes  to  modern 
Phariseeism  the  sanctity  of  its  ideals.  It  is 
not  surprising  that  the  free  woman  of  to-day 
bears  a  grudge  against  marriage. 

Our  system  of  marriage  has  robbed  woman 
of  her  primal  right  of  "natural  selection,"  the 
Creator's  gift  to  the  female  of  the  species  which 
elects  her  as  nature's  vestal  of  the  flame  of  life. 
When  a  woman  loves,  her  soul  and  body  be- 
come the  meeting  place  for  all  the  forces  of 
creation.  A  woman  in  love  becomes  the  child, 
the  savage  and  the  genius  of  nature.  A 
woman  in  love — how  sublime,  absurd,  tragic, 
foolish,  divine  and  pitiful  she  is.  Human- 
ity's link  with  the  Unborn;  woman  would  be 
lost  in  the  infinities  of  her  nature,  if  nature  had 
not  cared  so  richly  for  her  own  and  provided 
woman's  instinct  to  guide  her  in  the  chaos  of 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     73 

the  primal  passion.  Thus  woman  remains  im- 
pregnably  sound,  intuitive,  exacting  and  selec- 
tive in  the  bestowal  of  her  love,  for  she  knows, 
instinctively,  that  when  she  gives  herself  she 
gives  everything:  the  nature  of  humanity  it- 
self to  be  molded  through  her  being.  And 
unto  what  hands  of  man  woman  hath  delivered 
herself  through  man's  system  of  marriage! 

The  awakening  of  woman  has  been  with  the 
dawning  realization  of  her  great  loss,  human- 
ity's great  loss,  through  the  surrender  of  her- 
self in  marriage.  Instinctively,  blindly,  and 
with  mystic  savagery,  woman  is  now  groping 
about  the  cosmos  of  human  affair  in  search  of 
woman's  birthright  again.  Herself!  That  is 
all,  and  everything.  But  for  this — there  may 
have  to  come  another  Luther  as  a  leader  of 
men,  an  Apostle  of  Nature,  powerful  enough 
to  upset  the  world  in  another  Reformation  of 
Marriage. 

It  is  no  wonder  that  marriage  in  its  present 
form  of  undisguised  materialism  does  not  ap- 
peal to  the  superior  woman.  Its  old-fashioned 
lure  as  a  means  of  self-preservation  from  the 
suspicion  and  stones  of  society,  or  as  a  means 


74        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

of  livelihood,  on  its  lowest  possible  terms,  sub- 
sistence subject  to  the  will  of  the  master,  has 
no  longer  any  charm  for  her.  The  self-sup- 
porting woman  of  modern  conditions  has  too 
clearly  revealed  the  true  status  of  the  "sup- 
ported" wife.  "Life-long  support"  on  the 
terms  of  life-long  marriage  cannot  entice  any 
woman  capable  of  self-support,  and  therefore 
of  self-respect.  Woman's  "support"  in  mar- 
riage is  not  given  on  the  self-respecting  basis 
that  the  sensitive  modern  requires  in  the  eco- 
nomic sphere  of  his  or  her  existence.  Even 
the  mercenary  woman  is  no  longer  attracted 
by  the  system's  honeyed  utterance  "with  all  my 
worldly  goods  I  thee  endow"  at  the  altar,  since 
she  too  has  come  to  realize  that  woman  is  made 
to  ask,  beg,  wheedle,  extort  or  blackmail  her 
keeper  for  a  part  of  these  worldly  goods  upon 
the  hearth.  Without  any  economic  value 
placed  upon  woman's  services  in  the  home,  they 
have  become  to  her  slave  services,  ignominious 
services  without  a  gain  for  power  or  esteem  as 
in  all  services  outside  the  home;  and  yet  these 
are  the  primal  services  of  woman,  economically, 
and  her  most  essential  contribution  to  the 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     75 

world's  work.  When  woman  was  being  ideal- 
ized as  the  Wife  of  Man,  her  pauperization  in 
the  home  seemed  necessary  to  the  system  to 
keep  her  married ;  and  when  the  fierce  fight  was 
waged  over  the  Married  Woman's  Property 
Act  it  was  opposed  on  the  grounds  that  it 
would  at  once  destroy  the  home  (divorce  laws 
have  always  been  opposed  on  the  same 
grounds)  for  it  seemed  inconceivable  to  the 
mind  of  those  days  that  woman  would  remain 
voluntarily  in  the  home  if  she  possessed  any 
means  of  escape. 

To-day  woman  has  discovered  that  she  can 
escape  from  marriage  and  from  the  home,  but 
she  still  continues  to  marry,  and  of  her  own 
free  will.  She  reveals,  in  fact,  a  strong  bias 
in  favor  of  marriage — as  statistics  show — when 
it  is  a  first  marriage.  Marriage  does  not  hold 
woman  as  a  habit  as  it  holds  man,  but  it  still 
entices  her  as  an  experiment.  She  refuses  to 
consider  it  as  a  means  of  livelihood,  the  one 
modus  Vivendi  of  the  old-fashioned  woman,  but 
it  appeals  to  her  now  as  a  means  of  self-realiza- 
tion. Woman,  proverbially  curious,  wants  to 
know  the  mysteries  of  life;  and  marriage  has 


76        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

been  contrived  by  the  system  as  The  Great 
Mystery  to  woman.  The  asterisks  of  litera- 
ture on  the  subject,  the  secrecies  of  society,  the 
purity  of  the  home,  the  Comstockery  of  Amer- 
ican life — all  for  the  sake  of  the  young  girl!— 
contrive  to  excite  her  mind  with  such  a  sense 
of  mystery  that  she  becomes  eager,  with  Eve- 
like  eagerness,  before  the  forbidden  knowledge 
and  fairly  precipitates  herself  into  her  first 
marriage.  But  with  knowledge  and  maturity 
woman  becomes  averse,  statistically  recorded, 
to  the  second,  third,  fourth  and  fifth  marriage, 
as  compared  to  man. 

This  does  not  imply,  necessarily,  disenchant- 
ment for  a  woman  in  marriage,  it  is  merely 
indicative  of  a  discovery  she  makes,  through 
the  experience  of  marriage,  that  woman's 
higher  forms  of  self-realization  can  only  be 
attained  outside  of  marriage.  For  it  is  only 
the  unmarried  woman,  in  the  conditions  of 
modern  life,  who  is  permitted  the  right  to  self- 
realization  and  the  indulgence  of  a  personality. 
As  the  young  girl  in  America,  the  self-support- 
ing woman  or  the  society  celibate,  woman  is 
granted  a  perfect  social  leeway  to  create  her- 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     77 

self  as  she  desires  to  be.  She  can  come  and 
go  as  she  pleases,  she  can  give  and  take  in 
charm  and  contact  with  all  humanity,  and — 
most  dazzling  license  of  all! — unmarried, 
woman  remains  free  from  the  Suspicion  that 
has  been  ever  attendant  upon  her  Sex,  the  Sus- 
picion that  has  haunted  the  world  since  the  fall 
from  Eden,  the  Suspicion  that  birthmarks 
every  female  with  the  blush  of  shame — the  sus- 
picion as  to  the  existence  or  non-existence  of 
her  one  and  only  "virtue,"  the  great  negative 
virtue  as  the  Ideal  virtue  of  the  monogamously 
cultivated  female.  And  it  is  the  freedom  from 
this  suspicion  in  celibacy  that  has  made  it  such 
a  glamourous  state  of  life  to  the  modern 
woman. 

It  is  only  in  an  atmosphere  of  freedom  that 
one  can  develop  a  natural,  wholesome,  or  mag- 
netic personality.  The  psychological  results 
of  woman's  new- found-freedom  are  revealed  in 
the  splendid  human  qualities  and  dynamic  per- 
sonalities which  have  made  the  womanhood  of 
America  renowned  in  the  four  quarters  of  the 
globe.  For  instance,  the  young  girl  in  Amer- 
ica, free  from  the  chaperonage  and  suspicion 


78        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

that  dogs  her  hours  and  days  in  the  Old  World, 
has  made  of  herself  a  personality  with  an  in- 
ternational prestige  for  vividness  and  charm; 
the  widow  and  divorcee  of  this  country,  who 
in  independence  becomes  so  shy  of  marriage, 
is  so  far-famed  for  sheer  liveliness  of  person- 
ality, that  she  serves  to  make  marriage,  her 
marriage,  appear  as  a  great  success  after  all, 
to  naive  maidens ;  and  the  self-supporting  celi- 
bate, in  her  freedom,  is  undoubtedly  the  aristo- 
crat among  American  women,  for  she  is  envied, 
aped  and  respected  by  them  all  for  her  dis- 
tinguished capability,  refinement  and  selective 
power  in  love.  Of  late  the  custom  is  growing 
for  a  woman  who  has  become  a  personality  in 
public  life  or  interest,  to  retain  her  maiden 
name  and  to  keep  her  marriage  and  private  life 
as  secret  as  possible:  the  supreme  compliment 
to  women's  new  glorification  of  celibacy. 

On  the  other  hand,  everybody,  the  public,  the 
pastors  of  the  flocks,  Mrs.  Grundy,  and  all  the 
Argus  eyes  of  Peacock  Alley,  suspect  and 
watch  the  married  woman.  As  wife,  the 
American  woman  is  chaperoned  by  society,  as 
though  all  society  were  in  some  secret  service 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     79 

of  the  marriage  System  and  fearful  lest  the 
female  escape.  As  soon  as  a  woman  becomes 
the  Wife  of  Man  she  falls  under  suspicion  if 
she  goes  forth  unaccompanied  by  her  one  man, 
she  falls  under  suspicion  in  every  relation  of 
friendship  and  companionship  with  any  man 
other  than  the  licensed  One,  she  falls  under  sus- 
picion if  she  appears  lively  and  pleasure-loving, 
charming  and  a  natural  free-self,  and  most  of 
all  she  falls  under  suspicion  if  she  is  of  the  ad- 
vanced sisterhood  type  and  wants  to  vote  on 
the  Marriage  and  Divorce  laws  of  the  nation. 
The  charm  of  society  consists  in  its  freedom 
of  contact  with  diversified  personalities  that  stir 
the  mysticism  of  spirit  and  sense  with  the  lure 
of  their  strangeness  and  the  glamour  of  their 
secret  life.  But  the  marriage  system  will  not 
brook  the  charms  of  social  freedom  in  the  stern 
lot  of  the  married.  Thus  the  convention  is  es- 
tablished that  man  and  wife  must  be  seen  to- 
gether in  society  in  order  that  everybody  may 
behold  their  togetherness,  their  indissoluble 
Fate,  their  eternal  couplement  of  the  Two  as 
One.  It  simplifies  matters  for  the  charming 
celibates  of  society  thus  to  segregate  the  mar- 


80        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ried  apart  from  the  rest  of  humankind.  So 
convention  demands  that  the  married  couple 
must  always  be  seen  in  public  together,  must 
be  invited  to  the  same  functions,  visit  the  same 
houses,  make  the  same  friends,  share  the  same 
affinities  and  tastes  and  experiences  and  con- 
tacts of  life  until  there  is  no  escape  for  the 
married  from  each  other,  even  in  the  hour  of 
worldliness,  and  everything  seems  calculated 
with  the  sinister  intent  of  preventing  the  mar- 
ried couple  from  ever  again  developing  any 
of  the  strangeness,  secrets,  and  sacredness  of 
self,  which  formed  the  fatal  lure  that  originated 
their  marriage.  A  brilliant  much-sought  bach- 
elor girl  was  asked  recently  why  she  had  never 
married,  and  replied,  "Because  of  the  Siamese- 
twin  ideal  of  marriage  in  Society."  Wells  re- 
marks upon  marriage  as  being  a  sort  of  social 
cleavage  that  divides  people  off  into  couples 
watching  each  other.  The  suspicion  and  es- 
pionage that  accompany  our  proprietorial  form 
of  marriage,  deliberately  cultivates  a  spawn  of 
repellent  characteristics  in  human  nature :  con- 
ceit, jealousy,  exaction,  distortion  of  motives, 
and  the  many  mean  traits  of  petty  self-aggres- 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     81 

sion  that  are  licensed  as  the  good  manners  and 
good  morals  of  the  married. 

Special  exceptions  are  arranged  for  man  in 
the  social  system  that  permit  him  to  escape 
from  his  marriage,  in  resuscitating  periods  of 
work  and  play,  and  this  is  another  reason  why 
man  endures  and  survives  marriage  with  an 
impunity  not  yet  gained  by  woman.  But 
woman  cannot  escape  from  her  marriage  ex- 
cept through  divorce ;  therefore  divorce  is  often 
resorted  to,  when  she  simply  needs  a  holiday 
from  the  marital  atmosphere.  The  atmos- 
phere so  sickening  to  a  healthy  soul  with  its 
airs  of  exclusion  and  enclosure,  of  stagnation 
and  stalemate.  Convention  demands  that  the 
wife  of  man  shall  wear  a  badge  on  her  finger 
and  a  tag  to  her  name  so  that  none  can  mistake 
her  in  public  or  private,  for  other  than  the 
wife  of  man.  Her  wedding  ring  is  her  symbol 
of  security  in  every  man's  respect.  It  is  a  lit- 
tle omnipresent  family  circle  in  whose  atmos- 
phere the  married  woman  must  sit — forever  cut 
off  from  all  the  enlarging  contacts  and  experi- 
ences of  life — sit  in  sacredness  and  loneliness,  a 
composite  being  of  Fakir,  Hen  and  Saint. 


82        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

In  thus  eliminating  the  rights  of  personality 
from  marriage,  the  system  has  succeeded  in 
eliminating  all  the  grace  and  play  in  the  rela- 
tion of  the  sexes;  for  neither  mysticism  nor 
courtship  can  exist  in  an  atmosphere  sur- 
charged with  captivity.  The  omission  of  the 
primal  needs  of  man,  woman,  and  child,  from 
the  marriage  relation,  makes  it  seem  as  though 
the  creators  and  supporters  of  the  system,  the 
dogmatists,  moralists,  rigorists,  sacramental- 
ists  and  Pharisees,  must  be  people  unendowed 
by  nature  with  any  of  the  qualifications  that 
could  attract  and  hold  another  by  the  might  of 
personality  alone.  On  the  face  of  it,  the  mar- 
riage system  seems  to  have  been  arranged  ex- 
clusively for  the  benefit  of  the  people  who 
never  should  have  been  allowed  to  marry:  the 
defective,  ugly,  decrepit,  unhealthy  or  sadistic. 
The  System  has  made  marriage  and  its  progeny 
uncesthetic;  whereas  Nature  planned  the  subtle 
functioning  of  soul  with  sense  for  love  and 
marriage  as  a  master  means  to  form  and  con- 
summate human  beings  in  an  atmosphere  of 
sestheticism. 

Although  woman  in  her  modern  phase  is  re- 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE    83 

vealing  herself  as  so  shockingly  natural,  so 
primitive  and  savage  and  wholly  feminine,  that 
she  is  bent  upon  a  Renaissance  of  Nature  in 
the  World's  affairs,  yet,  strange  to  say,  her 
enemies  and  detractors  and  Anti's  are  holding 
her  up  for  condemnation  as  an  example  of  the 
unnatural  woman ;  woman  demoralized  by  free- 
dom because  freedom  has  enabled  her  to  become 
so  selective  in  her  sexual  life  that  she  prefers 
celibacy  to  an  unnatural  marriage  and  sterility 
to  an  unnatural  maternity.  Here  is  the  amaz- 
ing revelation  in  woman  to-day:  she  has  sur- 
vived all  the  systems  of  civilization  to  make 
her  unnatural,  automatic,  false  and  Ideal,  and 
appears  at  last  before  the  world  in  an  ultimate 
triumph  of  Herself! 

Freedom  is  feared  for  woman,  more  than 
anything  else,  because  supposed  to  be  espe- 
cially perilous  to  the  monogamous  instinct  of 
woman,  set  in  her  solitaire  "Virtue."  But 
marriage,  without  freedom,  has  deadened  or  de- 
stroyed the  monogamous  instinct  in  both  man 
and  woman  to  such  a  degree,  that  there  is  left 
only  one  really  convincing  proof  of  its  atavistic 
existence  in  woman's  nature.  Strange  to  say, 


84        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

it  is  the  prostitute  that  proves  the  reality  of  a 
monogamous  instinct  in  woman,  for  she — to 
whom  society  accords  freedom  with  shame — 
possesses  a  quality  of  loyalty  to  some  one  male, 
her  "owner,"  "slaver,"  or  "lover"  despite  her 
physical  traffic  of  self,  a  loyalty  so  tenacious 
and  unreasoning  it  can  only  be  explained  as 
the  psychic  instinct  of  monogamy,  ineradicable, 
deep-rooted  and  ever-recurrent  in  woman.  In 
the  psychology  of  the  prostitute  is  discovered, 
also,  the  realities  of  certain  marital  virtues  long 
supposed  to  be  specialties  of  the  ideal  Wife  of 
Man:  self-sacrifice,  fawning  devotion  and  di- 
vine forgiveness  for  the  male  despite  his  every 
abuse,  injury  and  infidelity. 

But  the  aristocratic  celibate — who  refuses  to 
prostitute  herself  either  in  freedom  or  mar- 
riage— the  selective  sensitive  individualist— 
so  prevalent  in  modern  life — is  she  to  be  per- 
mitted to  escape  marriage — seeing  that  mar- 
riage of  some  sort  or  other  is  indispensable  for 
the  recruitment  of  the  race  ?  The  new  woman, 
without  a  doubt,  possesses  the  highest  of  eu- 
genic values,  therefore  the  sacrifice  of  conven- 
tion, prejudice  and  tradition  seems  a  small 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     85 

price  to  pay  in  order  to  reform  marriage  along 
some  lines  in  conformance  with  the  freedom- 
loving  modern  nature.  Since  so  evident  that 
we  need  systems  at  this  stage  of  human  prog- 
ress, then,  I  would  suggest  that  we  inaugurate 
a  new  and  life-enhancing  system  for  the  sake 
of  marriage  and  the  married.  An  established 
system,  in  the  social  life,  which  will  guarantee 
to  the  wedlocked  couple  a  certain  amount  of 
statutory  holidays  from  the  common  home  and 
common  life,  compulsory  separations  in  public, 
prohibitions  upon  all  open  performances  of  to- 
getherness, conventional  self-exhibitions  minus 
ring  and  other  insignia  of  the  conjugal  state, 
and  in  the  domestic  interior  itself  an  established 
etiquette  of  taboos,  and  suspension  of  conju- 
gal rights — legally,  religiously  or  voluntarily 
imposed — which  inevitably  will  form  a  fresh  at- 
mosphere for  married  life  in  which  personality 
can  be  made  to  appear  so  sacred  and  free  that 
marriage  will  be  undertaken  and  borne  as 
lightly  and  gracefully  as  a  secret  sin. 

This  would  be  the  first  great  step  towards 
the  dematerialization  of  marriage.  The  sec- 
ond great  step  would  be  to  make  divorce  sub- 


86        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ject  to  the  will  of  the  individuals  involved  in  a 
marriage  instead  of,  as  it  now  is,  subject  to 
the  will  of  the  officials  of  the  System  who  re- 
gard nothing  but  the  externals  of  marriage  and 
ignore  its  essential  life.  Divorce  should  be,  ex- 
clusively, a  matter  of  collusion  between  the 
Two  of  a  marriage,  just  as  marriage  is  a  mat- 
ter of  collusion  between  the  Two.  But  the 
System  has  made  the  collusion  of  the  married 
for  divorce  a  statutory  offence  for  which  the 
penalty  is  indissolubility  of  the  union. 

All  stages  of  society  and  civilization  have 
recognized  divorce  as  the  only  moral  regulator 
of  marriage  and  have  placed  it  on  the  basis 
of  mutual  consent  ("collusion")  until  the 
Christian  dogmatists  evolved  the  theory  of  the 
indissolubility  of  marriage.  But  even  in  its 
absolutism  the  Church  was  forced  to  concede 
in  fact  what  it  denied  in  spirit,  for  it  allowed 
"annulments"  for  "consanguinity  and  affinity 
up  to  the  seventh  degree,  and  consanguinity  of 
a  spiritual  character  such  as  god-parents  and 
god-children  and  even  on  the  grounds  that  a 
forbidden  affinity  had  been  established  between 
persons  who  had  committed  adultery."  It  is 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     87 

recorded  that  in  those  divorceless  days  there 
was  an  astonishing  amount  of  consanguineous 
relationships,  spiritual  and  physical,  discovered 
after  the  marriage  union  which  entitled  the 
"unequally  yoked  together"  to  the  decency  of 
"separate  bed  and  board."  To-day  marriage 
is  as  consanguineous  as  it  ever  was  but  the 
modern  does  not  possess  a  means  of  escape  as 
decent  as  that  of  the  medisevalist  with  his  all- 
veiling  plea  of  "consanguinity." 

In  the  United  States  divorces  are  being 
granted  at  the  rate  of  two  hundred  a  day,  but 
this,  by  no  means,  indicates  the  amount  of  di- 
vorces that  are  desired,  the  amount  that  ought 
to  be  granted,  nor  the  enormous  amount  of 
people  who  are  living  practically  divorced 
though  sharing  the  same  roof  "for  the  sake  of 
appearances."  The  reason  of  this  is  that  di- 
vorce has  been  made  unavailable  to  the  best 
part  of  our  humanity,  the  well-born  and  well- 
bred,  in  America,  because  of  the  nature  of  the 
offences  that  must  be  used  as  the  "grounds" 
for  a  divorce,  and  because  of  the  publicity  at- 
tached to  divorce  as  the  "deterrent  ordeal"; 
The  Ordeal  of  Divorce,  which,  as  a  matter  of 


88        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

fact,  deters  more  people  from  marriage  than 
from  divorce.  The  statutory  grounds  for  di- 
vorce, though  varying  in  every  State,  partake 
of  the  same  nature  in  them  all : — grossly  phys- 
ical, brutal  or  criminal,  representing  acts  which 
any  sane,  self-respecting  individual  would  be 
incapable  of  committing  no  matter  how  trag- 
ically mis-mated  he  or  she  might  happen  to  be. 
The  divorce  laws  recognize  nothing  but  the 
material  nature  of  marriage,  deny  the  psychic 
side  of  sex,  and  stand  as  a  testimony  for  the 
System  that  man  lives  by  bread  and  flesh  and 
force  alone. 

However  there  is  one  exception  in  the  na- 
ture of  the  legal  grounds  for  divorce,  found  in 
a  few  States  that  form  the  errata  of  the  Union. 
"Incompatability  of  temperament"  is  a  mod- 
ern innovation  in  the  grounds  for  divorce,  but, 
as  yet,  it  appears  in  but  a  few  States,  discred- 
ited alike  for  respectability  and  culture.  But 
it  is  at  least  significant  as  the  first  recognition 
by  the  State  of  some  spiritual  elements  exist- 
ing in  marriage;  and  reveals,  also,  woman's 
subjective  view  of  marriage  which  is  gradually 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     89 

insinuating  itself  into  some  of  the  legislatures 
of  our  country.  It  is  said  that  three  quarters 
of  the  divorces  granted  are  procured  by  the 
woman  and  yet  the  divorce  laws  are  established 
upon  grounds  that,  oddly  enough,  are  rarely 
the  ones  which  are  most  destructive  to  modern 
home  life  or  destructive  to  the  happiness  and 
well-being  of  the  modern  woman.  Few 
women  nowadays  have  the  problem  of  the  wife- 
beater  to  face,  but  a  sensitive  woman  can  be 
wrecked  in  soul  and  body  by  starvation  for 
love  in  her  marriage. 

The  divorce  laws  reveal  the  System's  denial 
of  the  personal  and  private  nature  of  marriage, 
for  the  legal  grounds  for  divorce  appear  in  the 
character  of  a  public  offence.  For  instance, 
the  usual  grounds  throughout  the  United 
States  are — felony  (which  constitutes  a  crime 
against  the  public),  insanity  (a  public  men- 
ace), physical  injuries  (publicly  exhibited), 
non-support  or  desertion  (leaving  the  family  a 
public  charge),  adultery  (only  when  corrobo- 
rated by  witnesses,  detectives,  and  other  public 
proof) — and  therefore  divorce  is  made  prac- 


90        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

tically  unavailable  and  impossible  for  any  in- 
dividual who  is  decent  enough  to  desire  privacy 
for  the  most  intimate  of  human  relations. 

The  modern  divorce  court  is  a  pillory  of  ex- 
posure for  the  personal  matters  which  even  a 
savage  had  the  instinctive  good-breeding  to 
veil  from  the  eyes  and  concern  of  his  world. 
Divorce  is  abhorred  by  the  supporters  of  the 
System  simply  because  it  betrays  the  unnat- 
uralness  and  unholy  secrets  of  modern  mar- 
riage. But  both  Society  and  the  State  man- 
age to  save  their  face,  in  the  divorce  court,  by 
an  idealization  of  the  child  of  marriage.  Out- 
side of  marriage,  the  child,  as  "a  natural  child" 
is  refused  protection  and  human  sympathy,  by 
all  the  Powers  of  the  System,  but  the  child  of 
marriage,  as  aptly  termed  "  the  unnatural 
child"  becomes  the  object  of  a  colossal  concern, 
a  monstrous  sentimentality,  from  the  Powers, 
as  soon  as  its  parents  desire  to  escape  the 
fecund  intimacies  of  their  hated  union. 
Whether  or  not  a  married  couple  have  a  child, 
whether  or  not  it  is  the  kind  of  child  a  couple 
ought  to  have,  whether  or  not  the  parents  are 
the  kind  of  parents  a  child  ought  to  associate 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     91 

with,  the  Child  of  Marriage  invariably  figures 
as  the  sanctified  excuse  for  holding  together 
as  One  the  Two  whom  Nature  has  pronounced 
divorced.  All  the  current  cant  against  di- 
vorce, and  all  the  artillery  of  modern  Moral- 
ity, have  been  reared  upon  this  figurative  child 
of  marriage  although  every  natural  instinct  in 
man  and  woman  assures  them  that  what  is  good 
for  them — love,  happiness,  harmony — is  the 
natural  right  and  primal  need  of  their  child, 
potential  or  actual. 

But  the  Law  of  Change  is  being  recognized 
as  the  Law  of  Life  in  every  form  of  man's  in- 
stitutionalism.  Even  in  the  institution  of 
Marriage  and  Divorce,  it  is  seen  that  they  have 
survived  only  by  means  of  a  constant  change 
and  adaptation  to  the  ever  springing  new 
ideals,  needs,  and  demands  of  humanity.  And 
the  same  type  of  supporters  of  systems,  right 
or  wrong,  who  once  forbade  divorce  to  the 
wretched  victims  of  marriage,  for  any  cause 
whatsoever,  now  seem  to  be  united  in  a  consen- 
sus populi  of  modern  Christianity,  in  declar- 
ing divorce  a  vital  necessity,,  but  only  for  one 
kind  of  wrong,  adultery.  Thus  concessions  of 


92        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  right-to-life  are  handed  forth  to  man  in  the 
meagrest  of  measures,  from  time  to  time,  by 
the  still  enthroned  martyrizers  of  man.  A 
final  word,  about  this  strictly  limited,  one  and 
only,  justifiable  cause  for  divorce,  adultery — 
now  so  popularly  endorsed  by  the  rigorists, 
dogmatists,  sacramentalists  and  Pharisees  of 
marriage.  This,  as  the  statutory  cause,  com- 
pletes our  evidence  as  to  the  fleshly,  material 
and  masculinized  interpretation  of  the  nature 
of  marriage,  for,  as  Gladstone  said,  "We  have 
many  causes  more  fatal  to  the  great  obligation 
of  marriage  than  adultery."  Woman's  atti- 
tude to  marriage  corroborates  this  view ;  for,  as 
we  all  know,  adultery  is  never  condoned  in  the 
wife  by  the  husband,  but  is,  as  a  rule,  condoned 
by  the  wife  in  the  husband  when  she  loves  him. 
For  woman  in  marriage  finds  the  affinities  of 
the  spirit  of  far  more  importance  than  the  vi- 
cissitudes of  the  flesh.  Besides  the  unfaithful 
male  frequently  possesses  personal  qualities  of 
lovability  that  endear  him,  indissolubly,  to  his 
wife,  despite  his  conquests  beyond  the  home 
(so  easily  concealed  by  the  male  unless  he 
wishes  them  to  serve  as  the  public  offence  for 


OUR  INCESTUOUS  MARRIAGE     93 

divorce)  ;  whereas  the  faithful  husband  is  as 
frequently  a  moral-bigot,  a  kill- joy,  money- 
tyrant,  or  soured  puritan  and  stand-patter  for 
systems,  right  or  wrong,  in  whom  his  wife 
would  welcome  anything  so  human  as  adultery 
and  so  liberating  to  her  from  marriage  to  him. 
Let  us  remember  that  Christ  condemned 
hypocrisy  more  severely  than  adultery,  and 
treated  the  sins  of  the  spirit  as  of  far  more  im- 
portance than  the  sins  of  the  flesh.  And  His 
attitude  alone  should  be  sufficient  to  prove  that 
marriage  in  accordance  with  the  present  Sys- 
tem of  Marriage  and  Divorce  is  not  in  accord- 
ance with  the  laws  of  Nature  or  Morality  or  of 
a  real  Christianity,  even;  Christianity  in  whose 
bemasking  name  are  committed  so  many  sins 
in  Man's  sacred  Homes  and  Temples  of  Mo- 
nogamy. 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY 

WE  stand  aghast  before  the  great  new 
ordeal  of  pain  that  has  opened  at  our 
feet — humanity's  dancing  feet  of  1914.  We 
thought  we  had  progressed  beyond  the  old 
plane  of  humanity's  physical  pain  and  had 
stepped  upon  the  great  new  plane  of  human- 
ity's moral  pain.  Physical  pain  unites  us 
close  to  mother  earth,  but  moral  pain  unites  us 
to  some  nerve  of  the  divine. — And  here  we  are 
dragged  down  again  to  the  old  plane  of  the 
physical,  beholding  another  crusade  against 
the  new-grown  spirit  of  man  in  the  hell  being 
dealt  his  body  in  the  Great  War — by  the  ag- 
gressive union  of  the  Normal,  the  triumphant 
majority  in  humanity. 

And  how  has  this  occurred  in  our  new  hu- 
manity— the  humanity  so  proud  of  itself  until 
a  certain  date  last  summer — so  sure  of  its 
change  from  the  past  nature  of  man,  so  hu- 
mane and  well-read  in  the  lessons  of  history, 
so  sensible  and  nervous? 

94 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     95 

All  our  questioning  seems  to  lead  us  for  an- 
swer to  the  bed-rock  of  human  nature,  the  hu- 
man nature  that  we  have  divided  so  fluently 
into  types  of  the  so-called  normal  and  abnor- 
mal natures  of  man. 

Is  there  something  wrong  in  this — our  con- 
ception of  human  nature?  Is  society — in  the 
sense  of  embodying  the  science  of  human  con- 
duct and  ideals — the  expression  of  the  best, 
the  soundest,  the  most  evolutive  instincts  of 
humanity? — We  see  everywhere  that  society  is 
the  creation  and  fortress  of  the  normal  being 
and  that  by  the  normal  being  is  meant  the 
more  fit  and  hardy,  the  more  resistant  to  pain, 
the  more  personal  in  his  relations  and  nerveless 
of  humankind.  Whereas  the  abnormal  being 
—thus  conceived — is  the  type  that  is  too  af- 
fected by  pain,  too  impersonal  in  his  relations 
to  life,  too  nervous — hence  disqualified  for  the 
struggle  of  existence  in  this  material  world 
which,  so  far,  the  normal  has  dominated. 

Humanity  has  been  developing  its  nerves  for 
two  thousand  years.  The  nerves  were  the  new 
factor  in  the  promising  life  of  twentieth  cen- 
tury humanity.  The  psychic  nerves  were  in- 


96        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

deed  a  novelty  in  the  old  somatic  nature  of 
man.  At  last  humanity  had  become  too  nerv- 
ous— we  believed — for  the  old  festivals  of  pain 
— once  endured,  ay,  enjoyed  by  normal  man- 
kind— and  war  seemed  obsolete,  crime  con- 
trolled, disease  under  a  microscope,  poverty 
on  the  wane,  and  humanitarianism,  in  all  its 
phases,  the  hobby  of  the  pillars  of  society — 
simply  because  of  our  nerves. 

Because  of  our  nerves  the  future  seemed  full 
of  change,  of  new  ascents  and  trials  and  evolu- 
tion for  the  species  called  man.  The  pain  of 
the  world  had  somehow  gotten  into  the  nerves 
of  some  of  us — of  the  abnormal  of  moderns — 
and  we  were  developing  sympathies,  sensibili- 
ties, a  sort  of  cosmic  consciousness  so  painfully 
new  that  it  was  wholly  repudiated  by  the  nor- 
mal being.  This  strange  equipment  called 
"nerves"  made  one  think  and  feel  and  be  in 
touch  with  the  pain  of  the  world,  therefore  the 
normal  being  armed  himself  against  its  spread 
with  a  web  of  conventions,  fears,  lies  and  se- 
crecies, to  cover  up  the  very  existence  of  pain 
in  this  "best  of  all  possible  worlds"  until  like 
all  denied  and  darkened  truths  it  has  burst  into 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     97 

a  still  greater  fruition  of  pain,  into  the  vast  new 
Gehenna  of  the  modern  world. 

The  battle  of  normal  and  abnormal  in  human 
society  is  worth  while  to  study  now  that  all  our 
roads  seem  to  have  led  to  the  Armageddon. 
To-day  we  have  no  way  of  distinguishing  apart 
the  abnormal  and  normal  of  mankind  except 
by  the  test  of  their  nerves.  Scientifically 
"nerves,"  the  state  of  neurosis,  is  but  the  state 
of  affectibility,  the  coenassthesis  or  systemic 
sensations  of  the  individual  being;  and  we,  in 
our  dislike  of  the  hypernormal,  have  regarded 
the  higher  state  of  nerves  as  a  pathological 
state,  a  morbid  psycho-neurosis,  in  fact,  and 
the  lower  state  of  nerves  as  the  glorified  nor- 
mality of  man's  fitness  and  health. 

According  to  our  social  and  physiological 
conceptions  of  health,  the  nervous  state  of  the 
so-called  abnormal  being  is  an  unhealthy  state. 
It  is  too  affectible,  too  conscious,  too  living,  for 
health.  Health  is  an  unconscious  state  com- 
pared to  the  intense  consciousness  of  ill-health ; 
and  sleep — how  normal  and  healthy!  compared 
to  insomnia,  a  disease.  Yet  the  quickening  of 
life  as  it  ascends  into  higher  and  higher  forms 


98        VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

brings  greater  and  greater  intensity  of  con- 
sciousness until,  it  seems  as  if  the  ultimate  of 
all  living  organisms  were  some  infinite  neurosis 
of  insomnia  and  pain. 

To  live,  to  feel,  to  be  conscious  with  every 
experience  and  knowledge  and  sympathy,  is 
the  goal  to  which  the  evolution  of  our  nerves 
would  lead  us  were  it  not  for  the  arrest  of  the 
normal.  The  normal  represents  the  fixed, 
neuro-cerebral  construction  for  the  continua- 
tion of  the  kingdom  of  matter.  It  is  the  ar- 
rested development  of  man,  so  that  he  cannot 
transcend  a  different  and  higher  sphere.  The 
normal  portion  of  humanity  is  arranged  to  re- 
sist change,  to  form  cakes  of  custom  and  chains 
of  tradition  and  everything  we  see  expressed 
in  man's  congregate  power  to  hold  down  to  the 
planetary  mean  of  human  existence.  The 
spirit  of  the  normal  is  the  spirit  of  the  law  of 
gravitation.  And  alone  accounts  for  what 
Bagehot  calls  "the  whole  family  of  arrested 
civilizations,"  which  the  history  of  the  world 
reveals.  India,  Egypt,  China,  Greece,  Rome 
— every  kind  of  civilization  and  humanity  has 
reached  a  height  through  the  travail  of  its  ab- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     99 

normal  beings  from  which,  sooner  or  later,  it 
has  been  pulled  down  by  the  aggression  of  its 
normal  beings. 

Modern  society  has  brought  about  complex 
and  accumulate  distinctions  between  the  ab- 
normal and  normal  in  the  nature  of  man,  but 
their  conflict  with  each  other  is  revealed  by  the 
profound  test  of  pain.  Thus,  roughly  gen- 
eralized, the  abnormal  is  the  type  equipped  for 
the  realization  of  pain,  and  to  reveal  it  to  the 
rest  of  humanity  in  creations  of  art  or  move- 
ments of  reform.  In  modern  jargon  this  type 
is  called  the  neurotic,  with  a  derogatory  signifi- 
cance in  the  term.  The  normal,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  the  type  equipped  against  the  realiza- 
tion of  pain,  in  himself  or  others,  and  this  na- 
ture expresses  itself  in  the  ''public"  which  so 
detests  the  painful  revelations  of  truth  in  lit- 
erature and  drama,  and  in  the  "society"  which 
ostracizes  every  evidence  of  human  failing, 
suffering  and  pessimism.  The  normal  being 
of  to-day  so  shuns,  fears  and  hates  the  realiza- 
tion of  pain  that  in  spite  of  himself  he  has 
thought  about  their  causes  more  deeply  than 
olden-time  man  and  so  has  developed  in  him- 


100      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

self  a  certain  nervous  self-consciousness  which 
has  made  him  abnormal  in  his  very  normality. 
The  normal  being  has  become  the  hysteric  of 
society.  Hysteria  originates  from  suppres- 
sions, conventions,  falsehoods  and  shams;  and 
as  society  is  constructed  upon  these  it  has  made 
its  upholders  hysterics.  The  neurotic  and  the 
hysteric  are  the  modern  types  of  humankind, 
and  they  are  actually  opposed  in  nature  though 
our  current  conceptions  have  confused  them  as 
one. 

The  nature  of  their  difference  springs  from 
a  fundamental  peculiarity.  For  instance,  the 
neurotic  is  marked  by  a  deep  inhibition  in  the 
currents  of  egoism.  In  his  nature  the  volun- 
tary movement  is  not  equal  to  that  of  the  sensi- 
tive, and  because  of  this,  he  is  uniquely  en- 
dowed to  suffer  through  sympathy,  and  the 
consciousness  of  the  impersonal  in  life.  But 
the  hysteric  is  marked  by  the  lack  of  this  deep 
inhibition,  and — in  all  the  disorders  of  hys- 
teria— he  suffers  only  from  the  craving  for 
sympathy  and  attention  upon  himself  and  lives 
only  in  the  orbit  of  the  personal.  This  ac- 
counts for  the  seeming  contradiction  of  insensi- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     101 

bility  and  suggestibility  which  are  so  distinc- 
tive of  the  hysteric.  It  is  the  inhibitory  force 
in  the  neurotic  which  enables  him  to  resist  the 
imitative  instinct  that  sways  the  hysteric,  and 
also  it  is  this  force  allied  with  the  inevitable 
humanitarianism  of  sympathy,  that  forms 
man's  psychological  resistance  to  the  impulses 
and  instincts  of  crime,  implicit,  natural  and 
normal  in  man. 

In  the  Century  Cyclopedia  we  find  a  defi- 
nition of  this  distinction  as  seen  in  the  nature 
of  woman:  "The  neurotic  woman  is  sensitive, 
zealous,  managing,  self- forgetful,  wearing  her- 
self out  for  others;  the  hysteric,  whether  lan- 
guid or  impulsive,  is  purposeless,  introspective, 
and  selfish."  But  in  the  aggregate  woman  is 
far  more  the  neurotic  than  the  hysteric  in  type ; 
and  man  is  far  more  the  hysteric  than  the 
neurotic.  Even  in  the  psychology  of  races  we 
see  this  distinction  revealing  itself  most  clearly 
to-day  in  the  nations  at  war.  The  French  peo- 
ple are  revealed  as  the  neurotics  and  the  Ger- 
mans as  the  hysterics  of  modern  culture;  and 
the  French  has  been  said  to  be  the  most  fem- 
inine and  the  German  the  most  masculine  of 


102      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

nations.  Wars  have  always  issued  from  the 
inspiration  of  the  hysteric,  and  pacific  move- 
ments from  the  inspiration  of  the  neurotic 
nature. 

But  the  nerve-state  of  both  neurotic  and 
hysteric  is  merely  the  signal  of  changing  hu- 
man nature  conflicting  with  environment  and 
with  each  other.  In  the  hysteric  there  is 
menace  for  the  future,  in  the  neurotic  there  is 
promise.  For  social  development  progresses 
only  through  the  gradual  discovery  and  sub- 
stitution of  impersonal  relations  for  the  per- 
sonal and  these  can  only  be  attained  by  means 
of  the  temperament  that  can  experience  im- 
personal pain. 

Sympathy,  then,  with  impersonal  pain  is  the 
hallmark  of  man's  superiority,  but  modern 
society  has  branded  sympathy  as  "unsound," 
"morbid,"  "unhealthy."  One  cannot  fail  to 
see  that  pain  is  the  ultimate  of  culture,  the  pen- 
alty of  greatness,  and  gives  the  one  lesson  we 
are  all  compelled  to  learn  within  this  terrene 
sphere.  The  will  for  pain,  to  know,  to  feel,  to 
help  the  pain  of  life — imbues  the  human  spirit 
with  its  only  nobility;  and  all  meanness,  low- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY    103 

ness,  ugliness,  and  the  social  diseases  of  virtue 
and  vice,  result  from  the  repudiation  of  pain 
for  ourselves  and  denial  of  the  pain  of  others. 
A  world-transfiguring  morality  could  be 
established  upon  the  simple  laws — that  good  is 
that  which  increases  one's  sympathy  with  pain, 
and  evil  that  which  makes  one  wish  to  give  pain. 
The  first  step  in  civilization  begins  with  the 
dawning  realization  in  the  savage  brain  of  the 
meaning  of  pain.  "In  every  nerve-cell  there 
is  memory,"  says  Maudsley;  and  sympathy  is 
inherently  the  racial  memory  or  clairvoyance  of 
pain. 

Genius  is  but  a  complex  of  all  the  nerve- 
elements  of  life;  and  the  nerve-elements  still 
form  the  mystery  of  science.  No  physico- 
chemical  theory  has  yet  explained  the  electrical 
currents  in  nerves  that  were  discovered  by  the 
researches  of  Matteucci  and  Du  Bois  Rey- 
mond.  The  nerve  life  is  quite  as  unfathom- 
able and  inexplicable  as  the  spermatozoic  soul, 
eluding  every  grasp  and  hypothesis  of  science. 

We  can  only  know  that  it  is  the  excess  of 
nerve-element  in  genius,  and  in  the  organisms 
of  the  higher  evolution,  which  makes  them  dif- 


104      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ferent  from  the  great  bulk  of  mankind.  The 
vividness  of  the  human  consciousness  depends 
upon  the  activity  of  the  nerve-process;  all 
thought,  all  feeling,  all  personality,  find  their 
maximum  or  minimum  development  through 
its  force  and  finesse.  It  is  this  neurosis  which 
enables  genius  to  know  the  things  unknown 
and  unf  elt  by  the  normal  being  who,  in  his  con- 
ceit of  omnipotent  majority,  attributes  all  the 
finer  and  higher  sensations,  emotions  and 
thoughts  to  pathogenetic  abnormality,  and 
considers  his  own  dullness  of  nerves  soundness, 
and  the  lack  of  sensibility  health  of  mind  and 
body. 

If  this  abnormality  must  be  called  patholog- 
ical, normality  can  be  proven,  as  convincingly, 
criminological.  The  genius  and  the  criminal 
are  at  the  opposite  extremes  of  the  human 
species  in  nerve-structure  and  temperament— 
not  meaning  the  criminal  in  the  juridical  sense 
of  crime  whose  definitions  vary  with  every  age. 
Marro  attributes  the  origin  of  crime  to  a  defect 
of  nutrition  of  the  central  nervous  system,  just 
as  the  origin  of  genius  can  be  said  to  be  in  the 
fulness  of  its  nervous  system.  Here  again  is 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     105 

seen  the  difference  between  the  nervous  and 
the  nerveless — but  in  the  general  definitions  of 
science,  the  genius  is  said  to  be  distinguished 
by  what  is  termed  hyper  algesia,  meaning  ex- 
cessive sensibility  to  pain,  and  the  criminal  is 
distinguished  by  analgesia,  insensibility  to 
pain,  which  is  both  physical  and  moral  in  him. 
The  state  of  analgesia  has  been  noted  also  by 
alienists  and  nerve-specialists  as  a  common 
symptom  in  hysteria  and  insanity.  This 
analgesia — spontaneous  or  artificial — in  some 
of  its  many  degrees,  exists  in  the  organism  and 
temperament  of  the  criminal,  the  savage,  the 
lunatic,  the  hysteric,  and  in  that  mass  of  ap- 
parently civilized  mankind  who  find  their  much 
belauded  "soundness,"  "fitness,"  and  "normal- 
ity" in  their  resistant  indifference  and  insensi- 
bility to  pain. 

With  this  fundamental  similarity  in  charac- 
ter of  the  criminal  and  the  normal  man,  they 
possess  many  other  characteristics  in  common. 
Everywhere  in  the  study  of  criminology  one 
finds  them  abundantly  recorded,  but  they  are 
given  as  the  characteristics  of  abnormal  man, 
whereas,  in  reality,  they  have  become  the  com- 


106      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

mon  characteristics  of  the  normal  man  of  mod- 
ern days.  A  review  of  some  of  the  most  strik- 
ing makes  this  clear. 

Criminal-anthropologists  agree  upon  the 
analgesia  of  the  criminal  as  his  fundamental 
state  of  mind  and  find  many  of  its  manifesta- 
tions identical  with  the  psychic  qualities  noted 
of  the  hysteric.  For  instance,  the  criminal 
and  the  hysteric  are  alike  in  their  preoccupa- 
tion with  the  personal,  in  their  self-satisfaction 
and  impressionability,  in  their  love  of  sensa- 
tional notoriety  for  themselves  and  of  sensa- 
tional slander  and  detraction  of  others:  quali- 
ties that  have  become  strikingly  familiar  in 
modern  worldliness. 

Dostoyevsky,  in  his  profound  study  of  crim- 
inals, expatiates  upon  what  he  calls  their  "ter- 
rible indifference";  Davitt  speaks  of  their 
mental  state  as  a  chronic  mood  of  "sinister  con- 
tentment"; Dr.  Wey  of  Elmira  writes— 
"Scenes  of  heart-rending  despair  are  hardly 
ever  witnessed  among  prisoners.  Their  sleep 
is  disturbed  by  no  uneasy  dreams,  but  is  easy 
and  sound;  their  appetites  also  are  excellent." 
Despine  remarks  likewise  that  nothing  re- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     107 

sembles  the  sleep  of  the  just  more  closely  than 
the  slumber  of  an  assassin.  Lombroso  and 
Ferri  have  dwelt  upon  the  attributes  of  cheer- 
fulness, stoical  fortitude,  and  that  optimism 
which  accompanies  cynicism,  as  characterizing 
the  criminal  almost  without  exception.  And 
Lombroso  mentions  that  executioners  have 
told  him  that  all  the  highwaymen  and  murder- 
ers went  to  their  death  joking. 

The  murderer  is  invariably  optimistic  and 
cynical.  He  holds  a  cynical  belief  in  the  crim- 
inality of  all  mankind  allied  with  a  touching 
faith  in  the  pardon  of  God  for  his  own  special 
wrong-doing.  It  is  rare,  if  not  impossible,  to 
find  a  criminal  of  any  degree  of  crime  whatso- 
ever, who  does  not  believe  in  a  good  God,  in 
universal  salvation,  and  who  does  not  feel  self- 
justification  in  all  his  impulses  of  crime.  For, 
as  Havelock  Ellis  has  shown,  the  criminal 
psychosis  has  a  curious  contradiction  to  its 
cruelty  and  insensibility  in  its  capacity — when 
endowed  with  any  refinement  of  thought  or 
feeling — to  attain  and  reveal  most  strongly 
the  qualities  called  sentimentality  and  piety. 

Now  a  summary  of  these  well-known  and 


108      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

established  characteristics  of  the  criminal: 
cheer,  content,  hope,  stoicism,  self-satisfaction, 
jocularity,  optimism  sentimentality  and  piety, 
seem  precisely  like  a  summary  of  the  most 
praised  and  desired  qualities  that  form  the  fa- 
miliar "sane  and  wholesome"  temperament  of 
the  normal  man  and  woman  to-day. 

Society  is  organized  on  an  animal  basis; 
therefore  the  criminal  elements  as  they  exist  in 
the  rudimentary  being  are  looked  upon  as  the 
eminently  fit  and  normal  equipment  for  man- 
kind. The  man  or  woman  who  becomes  a 
social  success  or  popular  leader  must  neces- 
sarily possess  the  criminal  temperament  com- 
bined with  a  cultured  adaptability  instead  of 
affectibility  to  civilization  which  enables  one 
to  be  lawless  in  egoism  and  lawful  in  acts.  Of 
such  are  the  kingdom  of  Earth. 

And  as  society  is  thus  organized  the  finer 
and  higher  types  of  humanity  naturally  ap- 
pear anti-social,  just  as  they  appear  abnormal. 
Tarde  observes  that  "in  a  savage  society  one 
of  the  chief  criminal  types  would  be  that  of  the 
delicate  and  artistic  natures,  sensuous  and  sen- 
sitive, ill  adapted  for  pillaging  neighboring 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     109 

tribes,"  and  MacDonald  says  that  "Savage 
races,  whose  minds  are  less  active,  react  with 
the  greatest  force  against  any  innovation  re- 
garding the  innovators  as  criminals."  In 
Sanskrit  the  word  for  action  is  the  word  for 
crime. 

Curious  and  general  confusions  of  ideas  have 
grown  up  to-day  regarding  the  genius  and  the 
criminal  because  of  the  attempt  made  by  so- 
ciety to  unite  them  in  the  sinister  category  of 
the  anti-social.  Christ  and  Socrates  ap- 
peared so  anti-social  in  their  day  that  they  were 
condemned  as  criminals. 

The  criminal  is  a  more  social  creature  than 
the  genius  judged  by  the  standards: — compat- 
ability  with  his  social  environment,  and  the 
consciousness  of  kind  that  animates  him. 
Quentelet  even  said  that  "Society  prepares 
crime,  the  criminal  becomes  its  executive." 
Consequently  the  criminal  does  not  seek  to 
change  society  as  genius  does,  for  society  is 
really  propitious  to  his  self -development  and 
is  arranged  by  Charity  for  his  guardianship. 

But  genius  possesses  the  anti-social  qualities 
for  which  society  has  no  understanding,  no  bars 


110      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

and  no  rewards ;  therefore  the  only  discourage- 
ment and  disarmament  it  has  found  for  genius 
is  to  relegate  all  the  higher  developments  of 
genus  homo  to  the  Clinic  for  study,  classifica- 
tion and  stigmatizing  as  the  abnormal,  the  mor- 
bid, the  psychopathic,  the  teratological  and 
neurological.  Forensic  science,  in  the  hands 
of  normal  men,  has  done  its  utmost  to  interpret 
the  symptoms  of  human  evolution  as  those  of 
devolution.  Neurology  has  become  a  science 
marked  with  the  skull  and  crossbones  of 
danger  and  disease,  to  the  public  mind;  for  in 
it  alone  can  be  found  some  explanation  of  the 
difference  between  the  genius  and  the  criminal, 
between  the  neurotic  and  the  hysteric,  broadly, 
between  the  nervous  and  the  nerveless — a  dis- 
tinction we  have  not  been  instructed  to  make. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  and  in  the  common  run 
of  life,  nervous  people,  who  live  in  the  higher 
nerve-centres,  such  as  brain-workers,  artists 
and  other  creative  personalities,  are  recorded 
statistically,  as  living  longer  and  in  better 
physical  and  mental  health,  on  the  whole,  than 
the  nerveless  people,  who  live  in  the  lower 
nerve  centres,  such  as  muscle-workers,  uncrea- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     111 

live  mediocrities  and  ordinary  "normal" 
human  beings.  Longevity  has  increased  with 
the  nervous  diathesis  of  the  modern  being. 
Youth  and  beauty,  too,  are  being  prolonged 
through  the  development  of  the  neurotic 
woman,  the  type  to  which  belong  all  gifted, 
cerebral,  creative  women. 

But  doubtless  the  tests  of  science  can  reveal 
all  modern  humanity  living  in  various  stages  of 
disease  just  as  the  tests  of  religion  in  bygone 
ages  revealed  all  humanity  living  in  various 
stages  of  sin.  Disease  is  the  modern  obsession 
as  sin  was  the  mediaeval.  So  the  normal  and 
the  abnormal  both  appear  to  be  in  minor  and 
major  stages  of  malady  or  race-distortion. 

The  normal  being  is  unhealthy  in  his  direc- 
tion towards — hysteria,  atavism  and  analgesia, 
the  abnormal  being  is  unhealthy  in  his  direc- 
tion towards — neurosis,  evolution  and  hyper- 
algesia.  But  humanity  must  choose  the  direc- 
tion of  one  or  the  other  as  the  future  itinerary 
of  its  soul. 

To  choose  the  abnormal  direction  means  to 
choose  the  hard  tutelage  of  pain.  To  suffer 
has  but  one  crown,  creativeness.  Great  crea- 


112      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

tive  minds  have  found  their  lightning  in  their 
darkness ;  and  have  mastered  that  one  and  only 
secret  of  genius  (and  perhaps,  too,  of  God), 
that  one  creates  in  proportion  to  his  capacity 
for  suffering,  for  melancholy,  and  despair. 
Suffering  is  full  of  knowledge,  melancholy  is 
full  of  dreams,  despair  is  full  of  self -resource. 
The  biographies  of  great  men  and  women  pro- 
vide the  evidence  of  this,  and  reveal  beyond 
dispute,  the  temperamental  or  philosophical 
unhappiness  of  genius.  Happiness,  if  it  can 
be  found  in  this  world,  is  reserved  for  that  sup- 
posedly normal  being  who  is  hysteric  from  his 
repudiation  of  personal  pain,  criminal  from 
his  insensibility  to  impersonal  pain,  atavistic 
from  his  negation  of  the  pain  of  change  and 
evolution. 

At  this  moment  I  can  recall  only  two  great 
men  of  genius  to  whom  public  opinion  has  ac- 
corded the  possession  of  "health"  of  mind,  and 
"normality"  of  organism — Goethe  and  Turge- 
nev.  Perhaps  this  idea  was  formed  because  of 
the  unquestionable  physical  perfection  and  ma- 
terial good  fortune  of  every  kind  that  blessed 
them  both.  But  now  they  afford  two  illustri- 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     113 

ous  examples  of  the  neurosis  of  pain  of  this 
study,  for  both  Goethe  and  Turgenev  pos- 
sessed the  so-called  pathology  of  the  abnormal, 
in  its  highest  degree,  in  their  exaggerated  sen- 
sibilities and  sympathies.  Goethe  confessed  in 
his  autobiography  his  life-long  unhappiness 
and  said  "every  increase  of  knowledge  is  an  in- 
crease of  sorrow;"  and  a  biographer  of  Turge- 
nev wrote  that  he  had  "never  known  any  man 
who  suffered  like  Turgenev  from  mere  De- 
spair." The  unhappiness  of  men  and  women 
of  genius  is  not  because  of  their  infirmities,  as 
we  are  directed  to  believe,  but  is  because  of  the 
nervous  organization  of  genius. 

"There  is  from  the  metaphysical  observer's 
point  of  view  neither  disease  nor  health  of  the 
soul,  there  are  only  psychological  states," 
writes  Bourget;  but  the  science  of  psychiatry, 
a  product  of  this  century,  is  in  an  elementary 
state  and  that  of  physiology  so  completed  that 
we  have  nothing  but  physiological  conceptions 
of  mental  and  spiritual  conditions.  Thus  the 
genius  of  Browning  has  been  attributed  to  the 
good  digestion  of  the  poet  and  the  genius  of 
Carlyle  attributed  to  his  indigestion.  Nordau, 


114      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

after  a  lifetime's  study,  discovered  no  solution 
for  the  riddle  of  genius  except  "degeneration" 
and  phrenopathic  nerves.  Dr.  Gould  revealed 
in  his  series  "Biographic  Clinics"  defective  eye- 
sight as  an  explanation  of  the  temperamental 
peculiarities  of  genius;  and  countless  medical 
and  scientific  writers  attribute  the  finer  sensi- 
bilities, emotions  and  "nerves"  to  visceral  de- 
rangements, uric  acid,  and  other  metabolisms 
of  our  corporeal  substance.  The  life  of  the 
senses  as  normal  and  the  life  of  the  sensibilities 
as  something  monstrous  has  descended  to  us 
as  a  literary,  medical,  and  social  tradition. 
Recalling  the  theory  of  evolution  which  said 
that  the  cerebral  development  of  the  human 
began  in  the  indigestion  of  an  overeating  ape. 

The  false  and  the  pathologic  holds  all  hu- 
manity in  a  spell  which  can  only  be  broken  by 
some  magic  cure  of  nature  hidden  in  the  mys- 
teries of  Love,  Art,  and  Joy.  In  their  at- 
mosphere humanity  finds  its  breath  of  great- 
ness; but  it  has  lost  its  way  to  them  because 
they  are  so  surrounded  by  the  shunned  path- 
ways of  pain. 

Love  frightens  away  because  of  its  pain,  but 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY    115 

it  is  only  through  its  endemic  sufferings  that 
love  attains  its  fulfilment  and  greatness.  The 
pain  of  love  has  been  the  forcing-ground  of  the 
sympathies,  and  thus  of  the  virtues  of  human- 
ity, but  they  have  been  evolved  chiefly  in  the 
soul  of  woman,  as  the  martyr  of  nature  and 
man  in  love. 

Man,  on  the  contrary,  has  never  attained 
spiritual  fulfilment  or  greatness  in  love  be- 
cause nature  and  the  social  conventions  have 
freed  him  from  its  pain.  He  has  developed 
his  love  for  woman  only  through  its  pleasures. 
Man  is  incapable  of  even  considering  love  with- 
out a  consciousness  of  its  pleasures,  and  there- 
fore it  appears  to  him  merely  physical,  ignoble, 
or  obscene,  until  man  has  become,  thereby,  the 
natural  censor  and  hypocrite  and  squeamish  of 
speech  regarding  "love."  But  woman  can- 
not think  of  love  without  a  consciousness  of  its 
pain,  therefore  it  appears  great,  mystic  and 
deific  to  her,  and  it  is  only  through  woman's 
nature  and  revelations  that  humanity  can  hope 
to  discover  for  its  ills  the  cure  of  love. 

Human  society  has  been  fashioned  by  man 
with  the  aim  of  securing  for  man  all  the  pleas- 


116      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

ures  of  love,  and  of  securing  for  woman  all  its 
pains.  Since  time  immemorial  society  has 
created  all  its  penalties,  responsibilities,  claims 
and  compulsions  of  love  for  woman  alone,  and 
for  man  has  so  safeguarded  its  pleasures  and 
license  that  it  has  completely  warped  the  sex- 
sense  of  man  until  he  can  not  consider  woman 
or  love  with  a  wholesome  breadth  of  view,  or 
with  justice,  honor  and  sympathy: — the  quali- 
ties of  human  nobility  sacrificed  to  man's 
pleasure  in  love. 

Nature  itself  has  made  woman  noble  in  love 
by  making  her  erotic  surrender  a  surrender  to 
death,  to  the  danger  and  pains  of  death;  and 
has  made  man  mean  in  love  by  making  his 
erotic  surrender  never  more  than  a  surrender 
to  life,  in  its  acme  of  egoism,  life  perpetuating 
itself  at  any  cost  of  pain  to  others. 

Since  civilization  has  been  arranged  for  the 
expression  of  man's  nature  and  not  of  woman's 
in  love — we  find  to-day  that  man  is  a  more 
normal  creature  in  love  than  woman.  Man  is 
hysteric,  atavistic  and  analgesic  in  his  love, 
thus  the  personal,  unsympathetic  thoroughly 
material  normal  being ;  and  woman  is  neurotic, 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY    117 

evolutive  and  hyperalgesic  in  her  love,  thus  the 
impersonal,  sympathetic,  spiritualized  abnor- 
mal being. 

Art,  like  love,  to  attain  greatness  must  con- 
tain the  pain-elements  of  life.  The  Greek 
spirit  has  come  to  signify  the  spirit  of  art  to  us, 
and  the  Greeks  gained  their  dynamic  quality 
in  art  and  in  personality  through  what 
Nietzsche  describes  as  their  spirit  of  tragedy: 
"The  longing  for  the  ugly,  the  good,  resolute 
desire  of  the  Old  Hellene  for  pessimism,  for 
tragic  myth,  for  the  picture  of  all  that  is  ter- 
rible, evil,  enigmatical,  destructive,  fatal  at 
the  basis  of  existence — whence  then  must 
tragedy  have  sprung?  Perhaps  from  joy, 
from  strength,  from  exuberant  health,  from 
overfulness." 

At  another  great  creative  period,  the  Renais- 
sance, the  artists  possessed  then  also  that  "over- 
fulness"  of  temperament  which  seems  vitalized 
by  all  the  elements  of  life.  The  Gothic  artists 
sang  at  their  work  as  they  built  the  magnificent 
gloom  of  their  cathedrals.  The  song  of  au- 
dacious strength  and  defiant  youth  that  does 
not  deny  tragedy,  ugliness,  suffering,  but  sees 


118      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

it  too  clearly  to  be  overcome  by  it  and  gets  rid 
of  it  in  the  triumph  of  creativeness.  The  gar- 
goyles and  tortured  saints  and  shadows  and 
cavernousness  of  Gothic  cathedrals,  with  the 
songs,  the  rose-windows,  the  gold  and  lilies  and 
painted  colors,  must  exist  in  the  soul  of  every 
creative  artist. 

The  weak  and  the  fearful,  the  empty,  the 
sick  and  the  morbid  deny  the  very  existence  of 
the  dark  things  and  the  pains  of  life.  Gifted 
youth  is  full  of  tragic  moods,  of  thoughts  of 
suicide  and  healthy  pessimism  which  decline  as 
the  vitality,  ability  and  passions  lessen.  Old 
age  is  optimistic,  cynical  and  piously  assured 
of  personal  salvation,  in  spite  of  all  its  mis- 
deeds, like  criminals.  Old  age  is  more  normal 
than  youth;  that  is  why  it  is  a  more  prolonged 
state  and  finally  a  chronic  condition  in  the  life 
of  every  human  being. 

And  Joy — the  greatness  and  the  health  of 
joy — where  do  we  find  it  in  our  hysterical 
hedonism  to-day?  Our  pleasures  depend 
upon  a  running  away,  an  ostrich-hiding  from 
the  pain  of  the  world  knocking  at  the  hospital 
of  the  human  heart.  The  apparent  joyousness 


OUR  NERVOUS  HUMANITY     119 

of  society,  which  we  see  so  fashionable  every- 
where, is  but  feigned,  imitative  or  toxic,  based 
on  nothing  but  hysteria  in  all  its  fears  of  truth. 
Balzac  wrote  that  "None  but  those  who  suffer 
can  paint  joy"  or  realize  it,  let  us  add,  for  joy 
is  but  the  consciousness  of  power  which  evolves 
eventually  from  the  neurosis  of  pain.  Again 
Nietzsche,  the  tragic  apostle  of  Joy,  tells  us 
that  "All  those  who  undertook  at  some  time  or 
other  to  build  a  new  heaven  found  the  power 
for  such  an  undertaking  only  in  their  own 
hell." 

Humanity  has  built  so  many  little  heavens 
founded  on  the  air,  that  now  at  a  time  that 
reveals  the  collapse  of  them  all,  perhaps  the 
humanity  of  to-morrow  will  undertake  to  build 
a  new  heaven  on  new  foundations  taken  from 
the  sound  realities  of  man's  earthly  hell. 
*  *  * 


IN  OLD  WORLDS 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN  OF 
JAPAN 

IT  has  become  the  fashion  to  look  upon  Japan 
as  the  great  land  of  promise  in  the  East. 
She  is  expected  to  furnish  the  link  of  civiliza- 
tion and  understanding  between  the  East  and 
the  West.  She  is  a  self-elected  world's  cruci- 
ble. Her  most  radical  admirers  assert  that  in 
this  land  of  the  Rising  Sun  is  to  be  created  the 
new  religion  for  which  the  world  waits,  a  sort 
of  re-orientalized  Christianity  uniting  the  best 
from  the  oriental  and  occidental  mind  and 
heart,  japanned  by  modern  science;  and  her 
detractors  can  only  say  that  she  has  stolen  her 
arts  from  China,  her  learning  from  Korea,  her 
constitution  from  Germany,  her  naval  system 
from  Britain,  her  Code  Napoleon  from  France, 
her  industrialism  from  America — and  so  is  a 
kind  of  mental  pickpocket  amid  the  family  of 
nations. 

The  Chinese  have  given  the  Japanese  a  con- 

123 


124      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

temptuous  name — Lie  Europeans;  the  Eng- 
lish call  them  the  Yankees  of  Asia,  since  en- 
countering the  new  enterprise  and  competition 
of  the  Japanese  in  the  far  eastern  trade;  and 
altogether  we  find  these  little  men  of  Dai  Nip- 
pon presenting  to  the  world  the  astounding 
phenomenon  of  being  the  first  oriental  people 
who  have  ever  opened  their  minds  to  alien  civ- 
ilizations with  an  appetite  for  assimilation. 

To  what  will  it  lead?  Illimitable  vistas  of 
world's  change  open  at  the  surmise.  Three 
quarters  or  more  of  the  earth's  population  con- 
sists of  the  yellow  races.  And  if  our  modern 
democratic  principles  have  the  might  of  right 
in  them  and  the  rule  of  the  majority  must  pre- 
vail in  the  future,  the  realization  is  inevitable 
that  the  nature  and  ideas  of  these  people  are  of 
more  consequence  than  our  own.  The  source 
of  every  race  is  in  its  mothers.  Man,  like  wa- 
ter, never  rises  higher  than  his  source.  For 
the  enlightened  Westerner  the  great  interest  in 
Japan  to-day  is  its  women. 

The  easiest  way  to  arrive  at  a  conception  of 
the  Japanese  woman  is  to  think  of  every  qual- 
ity directly  contrary  to  the  qualities  of  the 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     125 

typical  American  woman  and  to  see  her  as  the 
embodiment  of  these.  She  is  as  docile  as  the 
American  woman  is  aggressive,  as  demure  as 
the  American  is  flamboyant,  as  modest  as  the 
American  is  impudent,  as  humble  as  the  Amer- 
ican is  snobbish,  as  conservative  as  the  Ameri- 
can is  faddish,  as  reticent  as  the  American  is 
effusive.  In  fact,  in  the  Japanese  we  find  the 
commonly  expressed  masculine  ideal  of  woman 
more  wholly  realized  than  anywhere  else  in  the 
world.  To  the  truth  of  this  every  male  author 
and  globe-trotter  has  testified  with  intemperate 
eulogies. 

The  Japanese  woman  is  a  superlative  realiza- 
tion of  what  man,  even  the  occidental,  pro- 
fesses to  admire;  and  in  this  day  when  the 
threat  of  woman- suffrage  has  made  men 
threaten  women  with  the  loss  of  their  admira- 
tion, of  chivalry  and  the  much-vaunted  priv- 
ileges of  the  sex,  it  becomes  worth  while  to 
study  what  the  antithesis  of  the  suffragette,  the 
embodiment  of  man-made  femininity,  has  been 
accorded  in  admiration,  chivalry  and  privileges 
from  the  megaphone  sex. 

The  woman  of  Japan  is  as  much  the  product 


126      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

of  the  man  as  is  its  art.  In  her,  as  in  Japan- 
ese art,  we  see  the  beauty  of  a  simplicity  that 
does  not  issue  from  truth,  but  from  irregu- 
larity. She  is  a  paradox  of  naivete  and  arti- 
ficiality. In  her  is  consummated  that  complex 
craft  whose  final  effect  is  artlessness.  A  Jap- 
anese artist  will  spend  a  lifetime  learning  to 
paint  a  paper  kakemona  with  a  half-dozen 
strokes  of  his  brush.  Keinen,  perhaps  the 
greatest  living  artist  in  Japan  to-day,  will 
take  seven  years  to  fulfil  the  order  for  a  picture 
that  takes  but  a  day  to  paint.  Thus  these  peo- 
ple have  won  for  their  art  the  description- 
great  in  little  things  and  little  in  great  things. 
They  are  in  love  with  the  grandiose,  but  depict 
it  as  the  microscopic.  The  Japanese  is  a  na- 
ture worshipper  like  the  ancient  Greek,  but 
like  him  also  he  ends  in  anti-nature.  The  trees 
of  his  country  mean  so  much  to  the  Japanese 
that  he  has  their  changes  and  progress  daily 
recorded  in  his  newspapers  under  the  heading, 
News  of  the  Trees;  thefts  of  trees  sometimes 
occur;  and  the  people  will  travel  immense  dis- 
tances to  see  the  cherry  trees  and  the  iris  fields 
in  bloom;  yet  the  Japanese  as  a  gardener  cares 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     127 

only  to  develop  dwarfs,  fantasies  and  freaks  of 
horticulture.  Another  instance  of  his  perver- 
sity of  taste  is  that  the  favorite  subject  of  the 
Japanese  artist  is  tigers.  Everywhere  one 
finds  them  depicted — from  the  shoji  of  the 
Nijo  Palace  to  the  little  curio-shops  on  the 
Benton-Dori.  I  inquired  of  a  picture  dealer 
in  Yokohama  the  why  and  wherefore  of  this 
artist's  favorite  and  was  told  it  was  "because 
there  are  no  tigers  in  Japan."  In  other  char- 
acteristics besides  his  love  for  the  impossible, 
the  Japanese  resembles  the  Greek.  He  has  at 
once  the  soft  wickedness  of  a  highly  cultivated 
sestheticism  and  the  Spartan's  austerity,  great 
power  of  endurance  and  self-discipline.  Like 
the  Greeks,  too,  the  Japanese  teach  their  wives 
only  virtues  without  accomplishments,  and 
leave  them  to  their  own  and  their  children's 
society,  while  the  chosen  companionship  of  the 
men  is  among  the  women  to  whom  they  teach 
the  accomplishments  without  the  virtues. 

From  this  we  can  gather  some  hint  of  the 
masculine  psychology  which  has  created  the 
Japanese  woman  as  she  is. 

She  is  an  epitome  of  her  nation's  virtues. 


128      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

From  the  highest  to  the  lowest,  from  the  Em- 
press to  the  yujo  of  the  Yoshiwara,  we  find 
some  unparalleled  virtue  in  the  Japanese 
woman.  In  the  Dowager-Empress  we  find 
the  extreme  of  the  conjugal  virtues;  did  she  not 
mother  all  the  illegitimate  children  of  her  royal 
spouse,  Mutsuhito,  and  smile  complaisance 
upon  his  concubines  ?  And  in  the  unfortunate 
of  the  Yoshiwara  we  find  the  extreme  of  that 
filial  piety,  the  great  virtue  of  Japan,  which 
makes  her  willing  to  become  a  lotos  in  the  mud 
— as  the  famous  writer  and  beautiful  oiran 
Murasaki  named  her — for  the  benefit  of  her 
parents. 

Almost  everything  we  see  in  Japan  can  be 
more  or  less  traced  to  some  carefully  inculcated 
traits  of  its  women.  The  impressionability 
and  obsequiousness  of  its  men  doubtless  issue 
from  the  supineness  of  its  women;  their  subtle 
streak  of  treachery,  which  makes  them  so  un- 
reliable as  merchants  and  servants  in  other 
lands,  may  issue  from  the  sex-servility  of  their 
mothers,  for  the  enslaved  mind  ever  subtilizes 
and  revenges  itself  in  two-f acedness ;  their 
blood-thirstiness  which  so  horrified  the  world 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     129 

in  their  treatment  of  the  Chinese  at  Port  Ar- 
thur, might  have  its  root  in  that  deep  frenzy 
of  the  elemental  which  clots  itself  within  the 
baffled  woman-nature,  but  which  seems  to  have 
no  manifestation  in  the  winsome  meek  woman 
of  Japan  until  perchance  she  becomes  a  mother- 
in-law.  But  we  must  remember  that  the  To- 
kugawa  period  was  famed  for  its  women  war- 
riors; the  museums  are  filled  with  the  swords, 
longer  and  heavier  than  those  of  the  men- 
soldiers,  which  were  borne  by  them;  and  the 
women  of  the  Samurai  carried  out  its  ferocious 
code  of  heroics  as  sternly  as  the  men. 

The  millennium  is  expected  to  come  when 
the  meek  inherit  the  earth.  The  Japanese  peo- 
ple have  adopted  the  appearance  of  meekness 
as  one  of  their  distinctions.  According  to  their 
social  canons,  a  man  must  disclaim  all  merit  in 
himself  or  his,  must  eschew  all  ostentation, 
must  be  eager  to  die  for  his  emperor — and  even 
has  no  personal  pronouns  or  swear  words  in 
his  language;  and  yet  we  find  that  this  too 
obvious  humility  really  covers  such  an  intoler- 
ant arrogance  and  vanity  that  even  the  school 
children  are  taught  that  "to  be  laughed  at"  is 


130      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  most  fearful  thing  that  can  happen  to  them. 
In  the  days  of  the  Samurai  when  a  nobleman 
wished  to  guarantee  the  payment  of  a  bor- 
rowed sum,  he  affixed  to  his  note  the  permis- 
sion to  be  laughed  at  in  public  in  case  he  failed 
to  pay.  Behind  the  man's  meekness  we  thus 
find  an  exaggerated  egotism  and  sensitiveness 
to  criticism.  And  behind  the  woman's  meek- 
ness, what  do  we  find? 

The  mystery  of  woman's  meekness  is  the 
mystery  of  mysteries  in  Japan.  It  is  true  her 
lot  far  transcends  what  it  is  in  all  other  oriental 
nations,  and  her  chief  injury  at  man's  hands 
seems  to  be  simply  that  he  has  succeeded  in 
making  her  so  good  that  she  is  powerless  to 
influence  him  to  any  good — not  even  into  in- 
venting a  Japanese  word  to  describe  gallantry 
or  chivalry  to  woman.  She  has  been  made  to 
accept  the  doctrine  of  her  perpetual  obedience : 
obedience  to  father  as  a  daughter,  obedience  to 
husband  as  a  wife,  obedience  to  eldest  son  as  a 
widow.  For  two  hundred  years  her  conduct 
has  been  founded  upon  the  teachings  of  the 
sage,  Kaibara,  who  laid  down  the  law  for  her 
in  the  Onna  Daigaku.  In  this  venerated  doc- 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     131 

ument  the  virtues  befitting  woman  are  defined 
as — obedience,  first  and  foremost,  chastity, 
mercy,  quietness  and  self-sacrifice;  and  her 
worst  vice — jealousy:  a  natural  choice  of  the 
qualities  for  woman  in  a  country  where  a  man 
limits  the  number  of  his  wives  only  by  the  lim- 
its of  his  purse.  It  makes  duty  her  sole  honor, 
and  self-extinction  her  supreme  glory.  Her 
raison  d'etre  and  mission  in  life  are  explained 
as — enlivening  her  husband's  life,  bearing 
children  for  him,  and  in  waiting  upon  her  hus- 
band's mother  and  relations.  And  lest  she 
might  bear  the  palling  demeanor  of  the  martyr, 
the  most  annoying  of  all  demeanors  to  men, 
she  has  been  disciplined  to  conceal  every  emo- 
tion that  might  be  displeasing  to  others  and 
is  taught  from  her  babyhood  the  heroism  of 
smiles  and  the  noble  ingratiation  of  pretty 
bows.  The  Bushido  code  tells  her  also,  "Do 
not  sadden  others  by  intruding  your  personal 
grief  upon  them."  It  has  happened,  there- 
fore, that  the  Japanese  woman  has  fully  de- 
veloped the  trait  most  charming  to  men  in 
women:  reticence;  reticence  to  the  very  oblit- 
eration of  her  personal  woes  and  desires.  To 


132      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

insure  this  accommodating  principle  in  woman 
still  further,  he  made  talkativeness  one  of  the 
causes  for  divorce  from  her.  After  such  a  tri- 
umphant creation  of  goodness  for  his  woman- 
kind, it  does  seem  ungallant  of  him  to  have 
made  all  the  goddesses  in  Japan  of  an  evil 
countenance  and  disposition. 

We  can  read  the  character  and  domestic  his- 
tory of  the  Japanese  in  their  divorce  laws.  Be- 
fore the  New  Civil  Code  (adopted  in  1893) 
divorce  was  only  granted  to  the  husband.  The 
seven  causes  for  which  a  man  could  divorce  his 
wife  were:  disobedience,  barrenness,  disease, 
jealousy,  lewdness,  stealing  and  talking  too 
much;  in  other  words,  simply  if  he  wanted  to 
be  rid  of  her.  As  under  the  Mosaic  law  di- 
vorce was  invented  for  the  benefit  of  the  man, 
neither  law  nor  public  opinion  in  Japan  al- 
lowed to  the  wife  even  the  right  to  desire  a 
divorce.  Besides  she  was  taught  from  infancy 
the  popular  precepts  of  her  country  that  "all 
women  shall  think  their  husbands  to  be  heaven" 
and  "woman  has  no  home  in  the  three  worlds- 
past,  present  and  future" — so  she  was  grateful 
to  her  honorable  master  when  he  gave  her 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     133 

the  shelter  of  his  little  paper  house,  and  when 
he  bade  her  leave  it  to  make  room  for  a  new 
occupant,  she  blamed  only  herself  for  failure 
to  please  him.  The  Japanese  are  accustomed 
to  saying  that  gratitude  is  one  of  the  strong- 
est traits  of  their  race.  In  order  to  divorce 
his  wife  all  the  husband  need  do  was  to  write 
her  a  letter  notifying  her  of  the  fact — the 
Mikoudarihan,  literally  three  lines  and  a  half 
—and  the  thing  was  ipso  facto  done.  The 
children  were  always  his  exclusive  property; 
and  he  did  not  have  to  make  any  provision  for 
the  poor  little  divorcee.  .One  wonders  what 
became  of  her  in  a  country  where  only  the  lower 
class  woman  can  be  self-supporting  and  the 
families  are  so  eager  to  be  rid  of  the  expense 
of  their  daughters  and  loath  to  take  back  one 
whom  divorce  has  marked  undesirable.  But 
some  one  has  written  that  she  always  remar- 
ried, "presumably  because  some  friend  of  her 
husband's  has  noticed  that  she  was  not  so  black 
as  her  mother-in-law  painted  her." 

The  Japanese  claim  with  pride  that  the  new 
Civil  Code  has  placed  their  women  upon  an 
equality  with  men — as  in  western  nations — by 


134      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

at  last  granting  the  right  of  divorce  to  the  wife. 
Their  idea  of  equality  is  illuminating. 

The  wife  can  now  get  a  divorce  for  various 
causes  and  by  mutual  consent  (which  would 
be  denied  in  America  as  "collusion"),  but  she 
cannot  get  a  divorce  for  the  adultery  of  her 
husband,  which  is  the  chief  and  often  the  only 
cause  in  western  civilization.  But  in  Jap- 
anese law  a  married  man  commits  adultery  only 
when  his  paramour  is  married  also,  thus  con- 
sidering only  the  injury  to  the  other  man,  but 
the  wife  is  guilty  of  adultery  whether  or  not 
her  paramour  is  married:  the  same  law  that 
exists  in  other  civilizations.  The  framers  of 
the  New  Code  also  laid  down  that  "a  person 
who  is  judicially  divorced  or  punished  because 
of  adultery  cannot  contract  a  marriage  with 
the  other  party  to  the  adultery."  Since  the 
husband  cannot  be  divorced  for  adultery,  this 
applies  solely  to  the  wife  and  constitutes  both 
a  modern  punishment  for  her  and  a  protection 
for  the  other  man.  In  former  days  the  law  of 
Japan  punished  the  adultery  of  the  wife  by 
crucifixion  or  by  decapitation  and  exposure  of 
the  head;  or  else,  for  the  sake  of  independence 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     135 

and  variety,  her  husband  might  take  her  to  a 
place  similar  to  one  shown  to  tourists  at  Kyoto, 
a  precipice  near  the  Kiomidzu  temple  where  it 
was  the  manly  old  custom  of  husbands  to  give 
their  wives  the  benefit  of  the  doubt  by  hurling 
them  to  the  rocky  depths  below  as  a  test  of 
their  possible  innocence:  if  the  wife  survived 
the  fall,  she  was  vindicated;  if  not,  her  guilt  was 
avenged.  But  the  Samurai  class  substituted 
for  the  barbarous  physical  punishment  the 
more  refined  and  up-to-date  torture  of  a  moral 
one.  When  a  woman  of  noble  birth  erred  she 
was  sent  to  the  Yoshiwara  for  a  term  of  three 
to  five  years;  which  was  considered  an  ex- 
emplary vindication  of  the  family  honor. 
There  are  many  stories  also  of  Samurai  women 
who  have  voluntarily  sold  away  their  liberty 
to  the  same  penal  colony  in  order  to  give  their 
husbands  or  fathers  the  means  to  purchase 
weapons  or  armor  in  time  of  warfare. 

The  Japanese  women  have  not  shown  much 
disposition  to  avail  themselves  of  their  modern 
right  of  divorce,  and  for  several  good  reasons ; 
chiefly  because  the  children  still  belong  to  the 
father,  unless  given  her  by  the  State  with  his 


136      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

consent.  And  children  have  ever  been  the 
weighty  anchorage  of  woman.  In  Japan  a 
woman  possesses  no  legal  right  to  her  child, 
but  the  husband  has  the  right  to  repudiate  even 
his  legal  child.  A  son  is  not  legally  recognized 
unless  he  is  registered  by  his  father,  while  also 
his  illegitimate  child  is  recognized  as  a  true  son 
if  he  is  so  registered.  "There  is  always  a  tacit 
recognition  of  a  father's  right  to  decline  the 
gift  which  Heaven  has  bestowed  on  him,  and  a 
new-born  babe  is  still  formally  presented  to  his 
father  for  acceptance.  In  old  days  unless  the 
new-born  child  was  laid  at  his  father's  feet,  the 
father  could  refuse  to  take  it,  and  the  child  was 
then  exposed  to  die  in  a  bamboo  grove,  as  the 
proverb  says." 

There  is  one  divorce  to  every  three  marriages 
in  Japan  and  only  one  per  cent,  of  the  divorces 
have  been  sought  by  the  wives.  Another  rea- 
son for  this  is  that  public  opinion  still  penal- 
izes the  woman  who  will  not  submit  to  every- 
thing from  her  husband.  When  a  Japanese 
woman  is  the  plaintiff  in  a  divorce  suit,  she 
loses  social  position  or  respectability;  but  if  she 
is  the  defendant  she  loses  nothing  but  a  bad 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     137 

husband  and  retains  a  good  chance  of  getting 
another  one.  So  love  for  her  children  and  the 
social  ban  of  sex  are  serving  to  keep  the  Jap- 
anese woman  as  effectually  bound  to-day  as  she 
was  formerly  bound  by  the  Confucian  social 
and  official  order. 

In  America  at  present  we  are  hearing  much 
against  the  facility  of  divorce  in  our  country, 
and  the  opponents  of  "woman's  rights"  attrib- 
ute our  domestic  disasters  to  the  emancipated 
ideas  of  the  American  women.  But  here  in 
Japan,  we  see  a  land  of  subject  women — fffille, 
on  nous  supprime;  femme,  on  nous  opprime" — 
and  yet  divorces  are  far  more  common  and 
easier  to  be  had  here  than  in  America.  This 
should  be  a  sufficient  answer  to  those  tiraders 
who  make  woman  responsible  for  every  wrong 
on  earth  at  the  same  time  that  they  deny  her 
every  right  to  be  or  act  as  herself. 

There  are  a  half  million  less  women  than 
men  in  Japan,  but  the  minority  has  not  en- 
hanced the  value  of  woman  nor  opened  to  her 
any  of  the  advantages  it  is  supposed  to  have 
procured  for  the  sex  in  some  of  the  western 
States  of  America.  Marriage  is  still  the  sole 


138      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

business  of  a  woman's  life  in  Japan.  If  she 
is  not  married  before  she  is  twenty,  she  is  dis- 
graced socially.  She  is  given  no  chance  to  de- 
velop ambition,  and  is  rarely  allowed  to  finish 
her  school  course  before  she  is  married  by  her 
parents,  who  are  eager  to  get  her  married  as 
early  as  possible.  That  she  might  develop 
some  of  the  ambition  of  her  brother,  if  given 
the  chance,  seems  possible,  when  we  learn  from 
Miss  Bacon,  an  authority  on  Japanese  girls 
and  women,  that  "in  some  cases  the  breaking 
down  of  a  girl's  health  may  be  traced  to  threats 
on  the  part  of  her  parents  that  if  she  does  not 
take  a  certain  rank  in  her  studies,  she  will  be 
taken  from  school  and  married  off."  The  hus- 
band is  selected  for  her  by  her  parents  and  she 
is  given  no  dowry,  but  is  given  as  complete  a 
trousseau  as  her  family  can  afford.  The  trous- 
seau of  the  bride  is  supposed  to  last  her  all  her 
life,  or  at  least  to  comprise  all  those  clothes  and 
household  articles  which  she  will  need  during 
the  next  two  or  three  years,  in  order  that  she 
will  not  have  to  ask  her  husband  for  money. 
When  the  wife's  stealing  is  one  of  the  causes 
for  divorce,  doubtless  this  little  spouse  never 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     139 

dares  go  through  the  pockets  of  her  lordly  hus- 
band's hikama  while  he  lies  oblivious  upon  his 
futon  on  the  ground;  and  one  wonders  where 
she  finds  the  yen  and  sen  to  spend  for  the  mys- 
terious contents  of  the  little  dressing  case 
which  every  Japanese  woman  carries  hidden 
in  her  big  pagoda  sleeve. 

Marriage  is  a  civil  contract  and  merely  re- 
quires registration;  but  certain  time-honored 
rites  are  observed  in  a  properly  conducted  wed- 
ding. The  bride  must  be  dressed  in  white,  the 
color  of  death-garments,  to  signify  that  she  is 
dead  to  her  family;  and  purification  fires  are 
lit  at  her  parents'  home  upon  her  departure. 
She  is  lifted  over  a  fire  at  the  threshold  of  her 
home  and  the  momentary  nearness  of  the  little 
bride  to  the  flames  of  destruction  makes  one 
glad  that  the  etiquette  of  her  country  allows 
her  to  escape  them,  unlike  her  neighbor  the  In- 
dian woman  for  whom  man  invented  the  fin- 
ishing etiquette  of  suttee.  After  this  the  bride 
is  taken  to  her  husband's  home  where  she 
changes  her  dress  for  one  of  a  livelier  hue  and 
drinks  with  him  three  times  three  little  cups 
of  sake,  which  concludes  the  marriage  cere- 


140      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

monies.  Until  the  Empress  Haruko  refused 
to  submit  to  the  fashion,  a  woman  blackened 
her  teeth  when  she  became  a  wife  and  shaved 
her  eyebrows  at  the  birth  of  her  first  child. 
Whoever  has  seen  a  little  Japanese  thus  dis- 
figured (and  there  are  many  provincial  and 
middle-aged  women  who  still  adhere  to  the  old 
fashion)  can  no  longer  blame  the  husbands  for 
their  habit  of  divorce.  Yet  it  all  originated  in 
the  desire  to  please  him;  thus  sacrificing  the 
wife's  attractiveness  upon  the  connubial  altar 
in  order  to  exorcise  f orevermore  the  green-eyed 
monster  from  his  soul. 

Delivered  over  to  her  honorable  master, 
what  an  extraordinary  little  wife  the  slit-eyed, 
doll-like,  little  mousme  becomes!  No  wonder 
Sir  Edward  Arnold,  Lafcadio  Hearn,  Pierre 
Loti,  and  so  many  lesser  lights  have  sought 
their  feminine  ideal  in  a  Madame  Chrysan- 
theme  among  them.  The  life  of  a  Japanese 
wife  is  all  incense,  flowers,  prayers  and  smiles 
offered  up  to  the  god — man.  But  it  is  the 
Japanese  lady  who  makes  the  ideal  wife.  The 
woman  of  the  lower  classes  is  often  quite  ex- 
ceptional in  her  deviations  from  domestic  rule. 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     141 

She  often  seeks  a  divorce — like  a  man — be- 
cause she  can  earn  her  own  living,  and  so  is 
ceded  the  tacit  right  to  a  choice  in  the  man  she 
may  support  with  her  earnings,  and  also  be- 
cause she  does  not  have  to  fear  that  bete  noire, 
social  position,  which  the  lady  must  lose  if  she 
is  the  petitioner  for  divorce.  It  is  well  known 
that  the  working  woman  in  Japan  receives  far 
more  consideration  than  the  woman  of  the  up- 
per classes.  And  really  it  is  not  the  woman 
who  coals  the  vessels  in  the  harbor  of  Naga- 
saki who  deserves  the  foreigner's  sympathy 
(so  generously  and  ignorantly  lavished  upon 
her)  for  she  is  the  freest  woman  in  Japan;  but 
it  is  the  undowered  lady  and  wife,  and  the  little 
beflowered  maiko  and  geisha  who  ceases  to 
paint  and  rice  powder  her  face  and  calls  her- 
self old  at  twenty,  and  the  poor  little  slave  of 
the  Yoshiwara  who  sits  in  her  cage,  disgraced, 
with  her  obi  tied  in  front,  sold  by  parents  and 
master: — the  toy  women,  the  subject  women, 
the  women  earning  their  living  through  sex, 
whether  as  prostitute  or  as  wife  and  mother, 
these  are  the  women  whose  lot  is  to  be  pitied  in 
Japan. 


142      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

Nevertheless  the  Japanese  woman  is  a  merry 
little  creature  who  seems  to  hold  forever  invio- 
late in  her  memory  the  treasure  of  her  happy, 
sexless  childhood.  Something  of  the  dainty 
creatures  with  which  she  played  as  a  child- 
butterflies,  fireflies,  dragon  flies — seem  to  have 
left  their  spirit  within  her  own,  for  it  is  full 
of  their  harmonious  consent  to  the  lights  and 
darks  in  her  wee  garden  of  life,  and  her  winged 
ignorance  is  never  troubled  to  query  as  to  the 
shape  of  the  earth  nor  saddened  by  knowing 
that  men  once  gave  up  their  lives  to  prove  that 
it  was  round.  Discontented  woman  seems  to 
be  chiefly  the  product  of  America  where  she  is 
treated  more  like  an  individual  and  human  be- 
ing than  anywhere  else  in  the  world.  In 
Japan,  she  has  uttered  no  complaints ;  she  has 
never  dreamed  of  politics  or  of  interfering  in 
man's  star-chamber  methods  of  laying  down 
the  law  for  her,  and  the  blue-stocking  women 
here  have  even  organized  societies  "to  resist  the 
invasion  of  Christian  institutions  that  would  re- 
lieve them  from  oppression,"  very  much  as 
some  of  our  advanced  club-women  have  organ- 
ized anti-suffrage  parties  in  America. 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN    143 

She  is  so  charming,  this  little  Nipponese 
wife,  who  has  dolls  strapped  to  her  back  when 
she  is  a  baby  in  order  that  she  grow  used  to 
her  future  burdens  in  the  j  oiliest  way — and 
wears  her  jet  hair  in  the  oddest  top-knot,  as  a 
proof  to  all  men  when  she  is  married — and 
when  dressed  in  her  best  is  tied  in  at  the  knees 
so  that  she  may  not  seem  to  walk  in  unwomanly 
freedom — and  walks  in  pattering  clogs  with 
her  toes  turned  in  as  far  as  possible,  the  fash- 
ionable walk  in  Japan,  since  men  said  it  showed 
"modesty"  in  women  and  so  started  the  fash- 
ion— and  wears  her  sleeves  so  long — "long  to 
dry  her  tears  with,"  as  a  poet  once  said — and 
lays  her  head  in  the  air  at  night  and  her  neck 
on  a  guillotine-like  pillow,  and  knows  the  alle- 
gorical meaning  of  flowers  and  the  solemn  tea- 
ceremony  and  how  to  smoke  from  a  tiny  pipe 
that  holds  but  three  whiffs,  and  a  repertoire 
of  kowtowing  and  salutations,  and  can  play 
on  the  samisen  and  count  sums  on  the  abacus, 
and  has  glances  and  hisses  like  a  little  cat,  and 
can  do  all  the  cute,  sweet,  quaintly  silly,  child- 
ish and  affected  things  which  appeal  to  men 
except  one,  the  most  popular  feminine  accom- 


144      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

plishment  in  the  West — to  kiss.  This  the 
Japanese  man  has  never  taught  her,  nor  had 
any  impulse  to  do  himself;  so  they  never  miss 
it  in  their  home;  and  she  makes  for  him  such  a 
perfect  little  home  according  to  all  his  stand- 
ards, that  it  becomes  incomprehensible  why 
the  Japanese  husband  is  said  to  be  a  born  club- 
man; and  like  the  French,  not  even  to  have  the 
word  for  home  in  his  vocabulary.  Surely  he 
has  everything  exactly  as  he  wishes  at  home; 
why  then  does  he  constantly  desert  home  for 
club  and  tea-house,  and  his  good  little  wife  for 
that  "dainty  iniquity,"  the  geisha,  as  Kipling 
calls  her,  or  for  worse — the  secreted  "hell- 
woman"? 

It  is  unknown  to  the  Japanese  wife  to  fail 
in  her  duties.  She  would  have  too  many  stones 
cast  at  her  if  she  did  and  a  paper  house  forms 
no  more  protection  than  a  glass  one.  Her  life 
is  all  arranged  for  her  with  a  wonderful  ingenu- 
ity in  destroying  the  leisure  that  a  house  built 
like  a  Japanese  paper  lantern,  without  furni- 
ture, and  with  one  "dust-hole"  in  the  centre 
where  all  the  misplaced  matter  can  be  dumped 
in  an  instant  and  hidden  by  a  clean  mat,  and 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     145 

the  fact  of  her  lifelong  trousseau — would  seem 
to  warrant.  But  custom  has  made  it  the  par- 
ticular honor  of  the  wife  (even  with  servants) 
to  perform  the  menial  services  for  the  family, 
and  they  have  been  multiplied  for  her,  sa- 
gaciously. She  must  be  the  first  to  get  up  in 
the  mornings  and  open  the  house  and  greet 
every  one  with  a  cheery  "O-Hayo";  then  she 
goes  out  in  the  diminutive  garden  and  gathers 
a  branch  of  blossoms  or  maple  or  azalea  twig 
and  arranges  them  in  a  vase  in  the  honorable 
tokonoma;  she  makes  and  takes  up  the  honor- 
able tea  to  her  honorable  lord  and  his  honorable 
mother;  she  brushes  her  husband's  clothes, 
fetches  and  carries  for  him,  and  hunts  for  what- 
ever odd  jobs  she  can  perform  for  him  and  all 
his  elderly  relations,  until  she,  with  all  the  serv- 
ants, sees  him  off  in  the  mornings  at  the  door- 
step. With  smiles  and  bows  and  respectful 
rubbings  of  her  knees,  and  perhaps  a  hiss  or 
two  but  never  a  kiss,  she  bids  him  "sayonara," 
the  pretty  Japanese  word  for  good-bye  which 
means  literally  "if  it  must  be  so." 

She  must  be  at  that  same  doorstep  when  he 
returns  in  the  late  afternoon,  to  show  her  hon- 


146      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

orable  impatience  to  fuss  around  him  with  at- 
tentions, to  conduct  him  to  the  bath  she  pre- 
pares for  him,  to  help  him  shed  the  European 
garments  he  wears  outside  his  home,  and  assist 
him  into  the  luxurious  kimono,  and  to  serve  him 
with  his  tea  or  supper.  At  meals  she  is  not  al- 
lowed to  eat  with  her  husband  or  sons  and  must 
not  even  sit  down  in  her  husband's  presence. 
(The  lower-class  wife  can  eat  with  her  hus- 
band— providing  she  sits  at  a  respectful  dis- 
tance from  him.)  She  must  not  speak  unless 
she  is  spoken  to,  and  even  then  is  supposed  to 
utter  the  exclusive  monosyllable,  yes.  She 
must  slide  back  the  shutters  for  him  when  he 
leaves  the  room  and  must  pick  up  anything  he 
happens  to  drop.  When  they  appear  in  public 
together,  she  must  walk  a  few  paces  behind 
him,  a  relic  of  the  days,  some  one  has  explained, 
when  a  man  must  be  protected  from  a  stab  in 
the  back.  But  they  rarely  do  appear  in  pub- 
lic together,  the  husband  taking  good  care  that 
his  wife  is  kept  busy  in  her  proper  sphere,  home. 
Upon  her  wedding  day  her  master  has  re-read 
to  her  the  sage's  commandments  for  women  to 
obey,  and  her  relations-in-law  never  permit  her 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     147 

to  forget  them.  One  is:  "Women  shall  al- 
ways keep  to  their  duty,  rise  early  and  work  till 
late  at  night.  They  must  not  sleep  during  the 
day,  must  study  economy,  and  must  not 
neglect  their  weaving,  sewing,  and  spinning, 
and  must  not  drink  too  much  tea  or  wine. 
They  shall  not  hear  or  see  any  such  lascivious 
thing  as  a  theatre  or  drama;  before  reaching 
the  age  of  forty,  women  shall  not  go  to  those 
places,  or  to  where  many  people  collect,  such  as 
a  temple  or  a  shrine."  So  her  day  is  amply 
filled  with  duties  as  house-maid,  nurse,  cook, 
seamstress,  valet,  and  general  factotum  of  the 
household,  so  that  she  doubtless  does  not  have 
time  even  to  dream  of  the  good  time  she  is 
going  to  have  after  she  is  too  old  to  want  it. 
The  flower-festivals  and  picnics,  the  wrestling 
matches,  the  temples  and  theatres — all  these 
wonderful  things  which  no  respectable  woman 
can  attend  while  she  is  young  and  pretty,  are 
given  her  when  a  hoary  mater  familias.  The 
only  dissipation  allowed  a  young  wife  is  an  oc- 
casional debauch  in  tea  with  two  or  three 
mousmees  or  matrons,  in  the  solemn  tea-cere- 
mony, the  Cha-no-yu,  which  takes  hours  to  per- 


148      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

form  and  is  the  most  ingenious  device  ever  cre- 
ated by  man  for  an  elaborate  preoccupation 
over  airy  trifles  and  harmless  nothings. 

Naturally  the  Japanese  woman  does  not  con- 
ceal her  age.  In  fact  she  is  more  apt  to  say  she 
is  older  than  she  is;  for  the  Japanese  have  a 
queer  way  of  reckoning  age,  by  which  a  child 
at  birth  is  called  a  year  old.  This  may  have 
started  with  the  girl  babies  for  whom  the  indul- 
gent parents  desired  to  hasten  the  golden  age. 
Age  is  a  favorite  topic  of  conversation  among 
ladies,  and  when  introduced  to  a  Japanese  lady 
one  is  supposed  to  put  her  in  a  good  humor  by 
asking  her  how  old  she  is.  The  Japanese 
translations  of  Moliere's  works  were  sup- 
pressed by  public  consent  because  they  rid- 
iculed old  age.  The  Japanese  generously  de- 
sire to  leave  the  illusions  of  old  age  for  the 
comfort  of  their  women.  In  this  they  are 
certainly  more  fortunate  than  the  Western 
woman.  The  latter  in  all  her  emancipation  has 
not  yet  emancipated  herself  from  her  most 
feared  and  pitiless  master — Age.  The  Ameri- 
can woman  is  a  coquette  only  until  she  is  a 
grandmother;  but  a  Japanese  woman  is  al- 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     149 

lowed  to  become  a  coquette  when  she  is  a  grand- 
mother ;  and  how  much  more  a  woman  knows  of 
coquetry  then  than  at  twenty.  The  tragedy  of 
most  women's  lives  is  that  they  do  not  discover 
how  to  live  until  the  mirror  tells  them  it  is  time 
for  them  to  die;  but  the  little  Japanese  can 
snap  her  fingers  at  this  reflection,  and  see  in 
every  wrinkle  a  springing  hope  of  wild  oats  to 
be  sown.  The  world  must  concede  that  in 
making  his  women  yearn  for  old  age,  the  Jap- 
anese has  achieved  the  triumph  of  man  over 
matter. 

Many  men  in  Japan  are  opposing  the  educa- 
tion of  their  women  on  the  ground  that  it  will 
create  a  servant  problem  which  hitherto  their 
country  has  been  free  from.  The  abasement 
of  the  wife  (into  the  general  servant  of  the 
household)  has  served  to  elevate  domestic  serv- 
ice and  the  social  status  of  servants.  The 
servant  is  ranked  above  the  tradesman,  the 
farmer  and  the  artisan.  Although  servants 
are  bound  by  rigid  laws  of  etiquette  and  have 
"no  rights"  at  all,  to  our  western  eyes  they 
seem  to  be  treated  like  the  members  of  the 
family.  In  old-fashioned  homes  the  servants 


150      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

commingle  with  the  family  after  working  hours 
and  can  help  to  entertain  guests  and  take  part 
in  the  conversation  and  laughter.  Servants 
are  frequently  university  students.  Prince 
Ito,  the  great  statesman  and  premier  who 
framed  the  constitution  for  the  New  Japan, 
took  the  position  of  a  waiter  during  the  several 
years  he  studied  the  English  language  and 
Western  institutions. 

It  was  Prince  Ito  also  who  inaugurated 
European  dress  for  his  people.  "So  long  as  we 
dress  differently  from  the  rest  of  the  world, 
they  will  regard  us  as  freaks,"  he  told  them, 
cleverly  appealing  to  their  sensitiveness  to 
ridicule.  Then  the  Empress  ordained  foreign 
dress  for  the  court  ladies,  and  for  a  while  it 
seemed  as  if  the  death  knell  had  been  sounded 
for  the  picturesque  national  costume.  When 
Japan  was  lifted  to  the  dizzy  height  of  the 
world's  recognition  as  a  first  class  power,  un- 
like all  other  peoples,  success  did  not  give  her 
the  intolerance  of  diversity,  but  gave  her  the 
apishness  of  admiration  for  all  foreign  things. 
The  men  accepted  the  foreign  as  their  official 
dress  and  many  made  their  wives  do  the  same — 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN    151 

as  a  sort  of  signalia  of  modern  progress  and 
revolutionary  change  in  Japan.  But  the  im- 
ported costume  has  restricted  itself  to  the  im- 
perial and  bureaucratic  circles,  and  is  doubtless 
worn  only  in  public  by  them  as  a  sort  of  play- 
up  to  the  civilizations  of  the  West  with  which 
Japan  is  so  eager  to  be  identified.  The  Jap- 
anese are  the  best  bluffers  in  the  world.  And 
they  would  not  be  so  quick  at  adaptation  of  the 
extraneous  were  they  not  arrantly  superficial. 
At  least  we  know  that  in  the  privacy  of  home, 
the  foreign  costume  is  immediately  shed  for  the 
more  comfortable  hikama  and  kimono.  But  of 
late  years  there  has  been  a  reaction  in  favor  of 
holding  to  the  native  costume ;  perhaps  because 
they  are  discovering  that  foreign  dress  makes 
them  appear  more  odd  and  ridiculous  than  in 
their  own  becoming  garments. 

Strange  to  say,  while  the  Japanese  men  have 
shown  such  zeal  for  the  revolution  in  dress,  the 
women  have  shown  themselves  most  loath  to 
adopt  it;  in  this  again  marking  themselves  the 
conservative  sex.  Excepting  when  her  hus- 
band's ambitions  have  demanded  it  of  her  (and 
even  then  it  is  discarded  at  home  when  no  for- 


152      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

eigners  are  present)  she  dons  it  only  to  have  her 
photograph  taken.  The  Japanese  adore  hav- 
ing their  photographs  taken,  a  la  European, 
and  the  stiffer  and  more  unnatural  the  pose,  the 
more  satisfied  they  are  with  it.  This  aversion 
of  the  Japanese  women  to  European  dress  be- 
comes extraordinary  and  baffling  when  we  un- 
derstand what  this  dress  signifies  and  procures 
for  her  in  her  country.  Upon  the  day  of  the 
declaration  of  the  new  constitution  the  Em- 
press Haruko  wore  European  dress  and  hat 
and  for  the  first  time  in  public  rode  side  by  side 
in  the  same  carriage  with  the  Emperor,  and 
that  night  at  the  state  dinner  was  offered  his 
arm  and  seated  beside  him — which  ushered  in 
the  new  era  of  public  courtesy  to  women,  on 
state  occasions  at  least.  Since  then  every 
woman  in  European  attire  is  treated  with  the 
appearance  of  a  respect  and  consideration 
never  accorded  her  when  in  kimono,  obi  and 
getas.  The  wife  dressed  as  a  European  can 
walk  beside  her  husband  instead  of  behind  him ; 
and  have  him  slide  back  the  screens  for  her  and 
assist  her  into  the  jinrikisha,  and  can  eat  her 
meals  with  him  and  receive  visitors  and  appear 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN    153 

at  the  host's  entertainments  and  mingle  in  com- 
panies of  both  sexes  before  she  is  senile.  In 
fact  this  dress  is  a  sort  of  uniform  of  progress 
and  compulsory  change  in  Japan  which  grants 
to  woman  privileges,  immemorially  denied.  It 
represents  for  her  emancipation  frorii^)ast  con- 
tempt and  public  humiliation ;  and  yet  only  the 
ultra-fashionable  ladies  have  adopted  it  (from 
motives  of  policy)  and  even  they  are  profess- 
ing more  distaste  for  it  every  day.  Woman, 
hugging  her  chains,  is  indeed  a  mystery. 

While  I  was  in  Japan,  in  all  the  big  cities 
from  Nikko  to  Nagasaki,  I  did  not  see  one 
Japanese  woman  in  European  dress,  but  saw 
the  majority  of  men  wearing  it,  or  portions  of 
it  combined  with  their  own  costume  which  gave 
them  an  incongruous  appearance.  Neverthe- 
less there  is  one  touch  of  foreign  influence  evi- 
dent upon  the  women  which  seems  to  be  gaining 
considerable  popularity,  and  this  is  a  new  mode 
of  hair-dressing.  One  sees  many  women 
dressed  in  kimono  and  obi  and  shuffling  pat- 
tens, but  with  their  hair  dressed  in  the  new 
mode  of  a  simple  imitation  of  the  Western 
style.  Without  camillia  oil  or  loops  or  that 


154      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

funny  little  pin  which  holds  it  out  in  the  back 
as  if  to  show  it  is  impossible  to  lay  that  unctu- 
ous head  upon  a  pillow,  the  hair  in  this  new 
mode  is  simply  pompadoured  over  an  imported 
"rat"  that  encircles  the  head  and  is  pinned 
upon  the  crown  in  a  flat  knot  with  side  combs. 
In  this  trifle,  of  hair-dressing,  there  is  con- 
cealed immensity. 

Until  this  modern  era  in  Japan,  convention 
decreed  that  woman  should  wear  her  hair  in 
specified  ways  which  announce  certain  personal 
facts  about  her,  interesting  to  men:  her  age, 
and  whether  she  is  maid,  wife  or  widow;  if  the 
latter,  whether  or  not  she  is  willing  to  be  mar- 
ried again;  even  her  respectability  or  its  lack 
must  be  publicly  declared  by  these  particular 
modes  of  top-knots,  loops  and  pins.  Hence, 
for  the  present  generation  to  adopt  the  non- 
committal hairdressing  of  the  West,  may  be  the 
augury  of  an  eventful  revolution  in  her  con- 
dition and  status.  The  first  glance  will  no 
longer  satisfy  man's  curiosity  about  a  woman. 
He  will  be  put  to  guessing  her  age,  her  amorous 
experience,  her  willingness  or  unwillingness  for 
the  marital  yoke.  What  a  new  element  in  the 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     155 

life  of  the  Japanese  this  will  introduce! 
Woman — an  enigma.  Woman  ending  so  un- 
expectedly as  an  enigma,  after  man's  centuries 
and  centuries  of  effort  to  make  her  as  defined 
and  confined  and  as  uninteresting  as  possible. 
And  what  a  successful  sphinx  she  will  become, 
this  little  Japanese,  with  her  half-opened  kitten 
eyes  and  her  watchword  "silence,"  and  her  un- 
canny refinements  and  Buddha-like  little  poses 
« — if  only  she  is  given  a  chance  at  the  blunted 
imaginations  of  her  men. 

Missionaries  attribute  the  degradation  of 
Japanese  women  to  the  teaching  of  Buddhism 
and  Confucianism,  in  whose  dogmas  the  sex- 
antagonized  ecclesiastical  mind  has  surpassed 
itself  in  calling  her  names:  "a  temptation,  a 
snare,  an  unclean  thing,  a  scapegoat,  an  ob- 
stacle to  peace  and  holiness."  But  since  the 
Christian  fathers  also  excelled  in  similar  com- 
pliments to  the  accursed  sex,  we  must  not  at- 
tribute her  position  to  the  animadversions  of 
holy  scripture  but  to  the  pathology  of  over- 
sexed man. 

A  nation,  of  course,  is  founded  upon  its 
homes ;  and  in  Japan  the  home  is  founded  upon 


156      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

a  separation  of  the  sexes  mentally,  morally  and 
socially.  In  the  Daigaku  one  reads  that  "it 
was  the  custom  of  the  ancients  on  the  birth  of  a 
female  child  to  let  it  lie  on  the  floor  for  the 
space  of  three  days.  Even  in  this  way  may  be 
seen  the  likening  of  the  man  to  Heaven  and  of 
the  woman  to  Earth."  Nevertheless,  the 
heavenly  qualities  are  expected  only  of  the 
woman.  It  would  be  laughable,  if  the  results 
had  not  been  so  tragic,  to  see  how  valiantly  man 
has  striven  to  safeguard  the  human  race  by  the 
exclusive  goodness  of  women,  and  then  has 
taken  all  the  credit  to  himself  wherever  and 
whenever  humanity  has  proved  itself  immune 
to  the  consequences  of  his  own  license  to  sin. 

In  Japan  the  human  duality  begins  early. 
After  six  or  seven  years  of  age,  the  sexes  are 
separated  in  play  and  study.  The  girl  is 
taught  that  she  was  created  to  serve  the  will  of 
man,  that  for  this  only  her  body  is  of  value  and 
her  brain  nothing;  and  the  boy  is  taught  his 
importance  in  the  future  of  his  country,  in  the 
arts,  sciences,  politics,  and  has  the  inferiority 
of  the  feminine  drilled  into  him  as  a  necessary 
part  of  his  education.  Thus  from  childhood 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     157 

all  social  intercourse,  sympathy  and  under- 
standing between  the  sexes  is  rendered  impos- 
sible. Man's  intellectual  life  is  shut  out  from 
home  and  wife ;  and  the  best  substitute  the  Jap- 
anese man  can  find  for  woman's  companion- 
ship is  at  the  tea-houses  among  the  geishas,  who 
are  said  to  be  "the  best  educated  women  in 
Japan"  with  their  poor  little  hetairai  accom- 
plishments. 

But  woman  is  on  the  road  to  discover  a  way 
to  stir  the  imagination  of  the  Japanese  man; 
and  that  is  one  element  the  Japanese  has  never 
yet  brought  to  bear  upon  the  sex-relation— 
imagination.  Sex  has  been  rigidly  kept  in  the 
realm  of  appetite.  Not  yet  has  the  Japanese 
evolved  the  imagination  to  clothe  it  with  the 
fancy,  the  poetry,  the  humanity,  and  the  divin- 
ity the  western  imagination  has  bestowed  upon 
it.  There  is  no  romance  between  the  sexes  in 
Japan.  The  relation  is  either  crude  and  busi- 
ness-like as  in  marriage,  or  unmentionable  and 
bestial,  out  of  marriage.  No  wonder  there  is 
no  word  in  the  Japanese  language  which  can 
be  translated  as  "love"  in  our  language.  The 
only  love  that  can  be  spoken  or  written  of  in 


158      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

Japan  is  the  filial ;  and  the  word  usually  trans- 
lated as  love,  "horeru,"  when  applied  to  man 
and  woman,  means  something  base  and  shame- 
ful. In  the  text-book  for  woman's  training, 
even  in  woman's  complete  library  called  Onna 
Yushoku  Mibae  Bunko,  the  word  love  does  not 
occur.  The  little  mousme  of  Japan  is  given, 
therefore,  no  sweet  dreams  and  roseate  illusions 
of  love — that  thrilling  Glory  of  the  western 
maiden — as  she  is  raised  and  rounded  for  the 
minotaur  marriage.  There  are  no  words  of 
endearment  for  lovers,  nor  for  husband  and 
wife.  Marriage  is  without  courtship,  court- 
ship without  kisses,  caresses  or  pet  names. 
No  Japanese  knight  has  ever  performed  a  deed 
of  valor  for  love  of  a  woman.  No  Japanese 
poet  has  ever  written  a  poem  of  "love"  that 
could  be  read  to  a  pure  woman.  These  people 
have  put  all  their  refinement  into  their  etiquette 
of  life  and  so  have  had  none  left  for  the  ele- 
mental facts  of  life;  they  have  put  all  their 
imagination  in  a  hair-splitting  epicureanism 
and  so  have  had  none  left  with  which  they 
might  dignify  humanity's  greatest  passion. 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     159 

When  the  Japanese  nation  evolves  the  kiss  of 
man  and  woman  she  may  cease  to  be  a  mim- 
icker  and  become  a  moulder  of  civilization.  A 
kiss  is  the  acme  of  imagination.  It  represents 
the  triumph  of  sex  in  ideality. 

In  reading  of  the  loveless,  kissless,  woman- 
denouncing  Japanese,  one  might  believe  him 
austerely  chaste,  puritanical,  the  true  ascetic, 
and  to  those  unversed  in  the  duality  of  human 
nature  it  comes  with  a  shock  of  surprise  to 
learn  that,  on  the  contrary,  his  ruthless  immor- 
ality and  licentiousness  are  notorious  and  the 
scandal  of  Japan. 

There  is  one  feature  of  this  so  unique  and  so 
illustrative  of  the  vicious  outgrowths  of  man's 
lop-sided  civilizations,  that  it  has  a  claim  upon 
the  interest  of  every  student  of  Japan  or  of 
human  nature:  the  institution  of  the  Yoshi- 
wara. 

Classified  with  our  "white  slave  traffic"  and 
the  sordid  evils  that  nightly  stalk  Broadway, 
Piccadilly  and  the  Parisian  Boulevards,  it  yet 
differs  from  them  all  in  certain  elements  which 
make  it  the  most  sickening  and  tragic  exhibition 


160      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  world  affords  of  the  inhuman  injustice  and 
shame  accorded  woman  in  civilizations  made 
strictly  of  the  men,  for  the  men,  by  the  men. 

At  a  temple  in  Nikko,  there  is  a  famous  pic- 
ture of  three  monkeys,  one  with  his  hands  cov- 
ering his  eyes,  which  means  see  no  evil,  another 
with  hands  covering  ears,  which  means  hear  no 
evil,  the  other  with  hands  covering  mouth, 
which  means  speak  no  evil.  This  is  evidently 
the  Buddhistic  formula  for  peace  on  earth, 
good  will  to  men;  but  thanks  to  the  men  who 
have  not  observed  it,  humanity  has  evolved 
from  some  of  its  barbarities,  and  most  of  the 
barbarities  that  exist  to-day  endure  because 
women  have  been  too  long  and  thoroughly 
trained  by  men — to  see  no  evil,  hear  no  evil, 
speak  no  evil. 

So  upon  the  silence  of  society  and  the  deaf, 
dumb  and  blind  ignorance  of  women  and  the 
double-ledgering  of  men  (double-standards, 
double-lives,  one  set  of  figures  for  women  to 
read,  another  hidden  one  for  man)  such  institu- 
tions as  the  Yoshiwara  have  reared  themselves. 

No  one  can  understand  the  Japanese  people 
until  he  has  seen  the  menagerie-like  spectacle 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     161 

of  that  portion  of  its  womankind  whom  they 
place  outside  of  human  rights  in  a  hideous  trav- 
esty of  human  dignity.  In  the  dusk  of  every 
evening,  just  as  the  temple  bells  of  Iriya  are 
pealing  forth  their  summons  to  the  strange 
gods  of  Nippon,  this  spectacle  begins :  women, 
girls — the  majority  mere  children  in  appear- 
ance— file  into  cages  which  open  onto  the 
streets,  exactly  like  the  cages  in  a  zoo,  and  sit 
for  hours  behind  those  wooden  bars  like  mer- 
chandise for  sale,  with  an  aureole  of  tortoise 
shell  combs  around  their  heads  and  bedecked 
in  garish  splendor  of  attire.  The  spectacle 
arouses  disgust  and  scorn  until  one  learns  the 
hidden  springs  behind  this  system  of  woman- 
sale  and  then  there  comes  only  pity. 

The  government  has  placed  its  sanction  upon 
this  institution;  "thus  sayeth  the  law"  is  more 
powerful  in  Japan  than  in  any  other  civilized 
country;  so  the  idea  has  been  perpetuated 
among  the  people  that  parents  have  a  moral 
(because  legal)  right  to  dispose  of  their  daugh- 
ters to  their  own  advantage,  and  the  inmates  of 
the  Yoshiwara  are  sold  by  their  parents  or 
adopted  parents  when  too  young  and  ignorant 


162      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

to  understand  the  nature  of  the  transaction  or 
the  ghastly  future  it  will  bring.  But  even  if 
she  knew,  the  Japanese  daughter  is  as  power- 
less to  resist  the  parental  will  as  her  brother  the 
soldier  would  be  to  resist  the  will  of  his  Em- 
peror. As  we  know,  she  is  taught  filial  devo- 
tion as  her  religion.  It  is  not  true,  as  has  been 
so  frequently  stated,  that  unchastity  does  not 
dishonor  a  woman  in  Japan.  Even  these 
slaves  of  the  Yoshiwara,  involuntary  victims, 
are  treated  as  below  humankind.  Until  a  few 
years  ago,  they  had  no  chance  of  escape  from 
what  even  the  Japanese  call  "the  bitter  sea  of 
misery."  When  there  were  runaways,  the  law 
authorized  their  capture,  punishment  and  re- 
turn to  their  keepers.  That  there  were  many 
runaways  we  can  believe  when  we  learn  that  the 
average  number  of  suicides  among  these  girls 
throughout  the  land  was  forty  and  fifty  a 
month. 

In  1900  the  right  of  "free  cessation"  was  won 
for  them  through  the  courageous  efforts  of  a 
foreign  clergyman,  and  during  the  following 
two  months  the  suicides  ceased  and  the  exodus 
of  girls  made  it  seem  as  if  "the  Nightless  City" 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN     163 

were  at  last  to  become  a  deserted  city.  And 
then  a  strange  thing  happened:  the  law  still 
exacted  that  a  girl's  debt  to  her  keeper  must  be 
paid  (the  original  price  paid  her  parents  for 
her  and  which  she  is  supposed  to  pay  off  to  re- 
gain her  freedom,  something  the  keeper  does 
not  permit  to  occur  unless  he  wishes  to  be  rid  of 
her)  and  when  she  thus  seized  the  opportunity 
to  escape  through  the  first  right  ever  given  her, 
the  law  authorized  the  attachment  and  forfeit 
of  her  parent's  property.  As  soon  as  the  girls 
discovered  this,  their  desertion  of  the  Yoshi- 
wara  ceased.  The  girl  is  now  held  there  by  the 
moral  obligation  to  pay  her  debt  as  powerfully 
as  she  was  previously  held  by  her  official  help- 
lessness. Nowadays  those  engaged  in  rescue 
work  are  first  asked  by  the  girls  who  desire  to 
escape  from  their  life:  "But  what  shall  I  do 
about  my  debt  ?"  One  writes :  "This  idea  has 
been  instilled  in  the  minds  of  the  women  until 
they  feel  that  they  are  committing  an  immoral 
act  in  leaving  while  they  leave  debts  due  the 
keeper."  Need  one  add  more  to  show  how 
even  the  immorality  of  a  woman's  life  in  Japan 
has  been  brought  about  by  man's  trafficking  in 


164      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

her  moral  nature  and  superior  sense  of  respon- 
sibility ?  These  elements  are  what  lift  the  piti- 
ful victims  of  the  Yoshiwara — the  legalized  sac- 
rifice of  womanhood  to  the  male — from  the 
realm  of  the  sordid  and  negligible  into  the  im- 
pressiveness  and  demand  of  monstrous  tragedy. 
During  the  past  four  years  there  has  been  a 
lively  agitation  in  Japan  for  a  complete  change 
in  its  social  and  moral  system.  The  leaders  of 
public  opinion  proclaim  that  something  is  rad- 
ically wrong,  but  do  not  seem  to  know  what  it 
is  that  must  be  changed,  nor  just  what  new  laws 
to  enact;  for  more  laws  is  the  masculine  solu- 
tion of  every  difficulty.  Concubinage  has  in- 
creased to  such  an  extent  that  the  Government 
recently  endeavored  to  strike  it  a  blow  by  en- 
acting a  law  that  hereafter  no  child  of  a  concu- 
bine could  inherit  a  titled  name.  It  is  said  that 
nearly  a  third  of  the  titled  names  in  Japan  are 
at  present  borne  by  the  offspring  of  concu- 
binage. All  the  children  of  the  late  Emperor 
are  thus  illegitimate.  And  the  geisha  and  kin- 
dred classes  are  increasing  to  such  a  degree  that 
it  forms  a  constant  topic  for  discussion  in  the 
press  and  for  wonder  and  alarm  in  good  so- 


THE  MAN-MADE  WOMAN    165 

ciety.  Many  predict  the  dissolution  of  family 
life;  others  harangue  the  women  for  lack  of 
wifely  devotion  and  so  forth.  Fukuzawa,  said 
to  be  the  greatest  man  in  Japan  to-day,  and 
sometimes  called  "The  Great  Commoner,"  says 
that  "the  first  step  in  the  reform  of  the  family 
and  the  establishment  of  monogamy  is  to  de- 
velop public  sentiment  against  prostitution  and 
plural  or  illegal  marriage;  and  the  way  to  do 
this  is  first  to  make  evil  practices  secret.  This 
is  more  important  than  to  give  women  a  higher 
education." 

From  which  we  gather  that  woman's  educa- 
tion has  been  proposed  in  Japan  by  some  fool- 
hardy reformers  as  a  possible  factor  for  the 
improvement  of  family  life  and  the  morals  of 
her  country.  But  the  great  Fukuzawa  and 
kindred  potentates  who  have  studied  the  West, 
declare  simply  and  solely  for  an  imitation  of  its 
institution — Monogamy;  and  in  creating  the 
new  standards  and  new  family  life  the  Japan- 
ese men  will  do  exactly  as  the  Western  men 
have  done :  sit  alone  in  the  councils  of  State  and 
Church  and  Academy  and  arrange  it  all  in  a 
stupendous  new  system  of  Marriage,  Divorce 


166      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

and  Morality,  with  the  nature  and  the  value 
and  the  soul  of  its  chief  factor  entirely  left  out : 
Woman. 

Until  Japan  learns  this,  her  ambition  will 
lead  only  to  the  futilities  and  never  to  the  tri- 
umphs of  the  West.  With  her  degraded 
womanhood,  Japan  will  always  remain  an  eth- 
nologic, geologic,  ethical  and  artistic  freak, 
which  has  "birds  without  song  and  flowers  with- 
out odor,"  fruit  trees  without  fruit,  music  with- 
out melody,  theatres  without  actresses,  soldiers 
without  pensions,  women  without  kisses,  mar- 
riages without  love,  and  at  last,  perhaps,  hu- 
manity's culture  without  humanity's  civiliza- 
tion, which  will  be  to  her  much  as  if  she  had 
gained  the  whole  world  and  had  lost  her  own 

soul. 

*     *     * 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN 

NOW  that  "Tea"  in  the  Western  World 
has  come  to  be  the  Sacrament  of  the 
dance,  the  gossip,  the  flirtation,  and  the  chief 
outlet  of  woman's  orgy-instinct  of  eat-drink- 
and-be-merry-for-to-morrow-we-die — it  is  per- 
tinent to  contrast  its  nature  in  the  Eastern 
World  whence  it  came  to  us. 

In  the  seventeenth  century  the  little  leaf  of 
the  Camellia  travelled  to  Europe  from  Japan. 
But  it  did  not  reach  its  present  devotees  with- 
out overcoming  the  usual  difficulties  that  beset 
new  things.  At  first  an  attempt  was  made  to 
restrict  its  use  to  Royalty  and  Plutocracy  by 
making  its  price  deterrent  to  others ;  then,  as  its 
popularity  grew  in  spite  of  its  aristocratism,  an 
attempt  followed  on  the  part  of  the  clergy  to 
ban  its  use  to  one-half  their  world,  at  least,  and 
they  denounced  tea  as  pernicious  to  the  health 
and  morals  of  woman;  that  lorn  object  of  man's 
protection  through  taboos.  Therefore  it  be- 
comes gratifying  to  relate  that  one  of  the  vic- 

167 


168      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

tories  of  Feminism  has  already  been  won  in 
this  battle  of  the  teacup,  for  tea  has  become  a 
common  and  democratic  beverage,  fairly  mo- 
nopolized by  the  sober  sex. 

In  Japan,  the  home  of  tea,  it  is  the  symbol 
for  every  ideal  the  imagination  can  construe 
about  life.  But  in  America  we  have  never  put 
any  idealism  into  tea-drinking  except  once: 
when  we  drank  no  tea.  For  awhile,  during 
Revolutionary  days,  all  loyal  Americans  re- 
nounced tea-drinking  for  the  sake  of  their 
patriotic  ideal ;  and  at  a  time  when  they  were  as 
great  tea  drinkers  as  the  English.  After  the 
famous  tea-cargo  was  thrown  into  the  Boston 
Harbor,  all  sorts  of  substitutes  for  tea  were 
resorted  to.  The  leaves  of  the  raspberry, 
strawberry,  current,  sage,  and  thoroughwort 
were  used  to  make  that  concoction  called  "Lib- 
erty Tea,"  which  was  partaken  of,  if  not  rel- 
ished, by  our  plain-living  and  high-thinking 
forefathers.  From  a  cup  of  Liberty  tea,  we 
may  be  sure,  there  was  sipped  more  of  the  real 
spirit  of  Japan  than  exists  to-day  in  the  real 
Japanese  tea  that  fills  our  rapid-transit  tea- 
cups. 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     169 

Japan  has  evolved  a  strange  and  beautiful 
thing  it  calls  Teaism.  Teaism  means  a  re- 
ligion, a  philosophy,  the  arts,  all  the  social 
ideals  and  the  essence  of  Japanese  nationality 
itself — poured  into  the  minute  confines  of  a  tea- 
cup as  an  elixir  for  sense  and  soul.  We  im- 
ported from  Japan  the  dried  leaves  of  the 
Camellia,  but  we  left  behind  that  Teaism 
which  contains  so  many  little  secrets  of  the  lost 
art  of  life. 

But  the  Japanese  say  the  Occidentals  are 
more  interested  in  the  art  of  death  than  in  the 
art  of  life.  Therefore  we  have  adopted  their 
school  of  the  Jiu-jitsu  and  ignored  their  school 
of  Tea.  And  our  thirst  for  knowledge  about 
their  Manchurian  battlefields,  their  Murata 
guns  and  Dreadnaughts  and  Code  of  Samurai, 
has  made  them  also  say  contemptuously  of  us 
that  Occidentals  have  blood-thirst  but  no  thirst 
for  tea.  When  a  Japanese  says  of  one  that 
there  is  "no  tea"  in  him,  it  means  that  he  is 
devoid  of  soul.  When  one  has  "too  much  tea" 
in  him  it  means  that  he  is  accursed  by  an  ex- 
cess of  what  in  the  West  is  called  "the  artis- 
tic temperament":  tangential,  cloud-gazing, 


170      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

dream-drunk.  To  have  a  thirst  for  tea  is  to 
have  longings  and  aspirations  for  those  graces 
of  conduct  and  ideals  of  thought  which  alone 
can  create  an  art  of  life. 

Among  Occidentals,  Americans  particularly 
have  the  wit  to  perceive  and  the  naivete  to  ad- 
mit that  somehow  they  have  missed  finding  the 
art  of  life.  We  are  the  vandals  instead  of  the 
masters  of  this  first  of  arts.  And  in  the  midst 
of  the  busy,  noisy,  mannerless  life  that  we  have 
made,  we  are  fast  realizing  the  initial  mistake 
that  has  put  all  experience  for  us  strangely  out 
of  gear.  We  are  suffering  from  too  much 
force  and  too  little  time,  from  too  much  greed 
and  too  little  taste,  from  too  much  show, 
sham  and  strife  in  our  talk,  our  thought,  our 
feeling.  All  of  which  ills  of  excess,  a  Jap- 
anese might  say,  could  be  cured  by  a  salutary 
treatment  of  Teaism.  Teaism  teaches  the 
sense  of  proportion,  the  strength  of  economy, 
and  the  attainment  of  harmony,  three  lessons 
most  sadly  needed  by  force-wasting  Ameri- 
cans. 

In  Japan  I  learned  the  significance  of  Tea- 
ism though  it  lives  in  my  memory  now  only  as  a 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN    171 

series  of  mystic  englamoured  pictures.  The 
idealized  tea-drinking  and  tea-thinking  of 
Japan  is  represented  by  a  formal  tea  ceremony 
called  the  Cha-no-yu.  For  this  impressive 
affair  an  especial  kind  of  tea  is  drunk,  the 
Matsu-cha,  considered  too  sanctified  and  too 
potent  for  ordinary  use.  My  introduction  to 
the  ceremonial  tea  happened  to  take  place  in 
circumstances  truly  favored  by  the  strange  Tea 
gods  of  Nippon. 

It  was  in  the  old  Zen  monastery,  the 
Ginkaku-ji,  at  Kyoto,  that  I  drank  my  first 
cup  of  the  Matsu-cha.  Even  to  me,  a  sacri- 
legious, vandalizing  tourist,  my  cup  of  tea  that 
day  was  sublimated  by  the  surroundings. 
Fantasy-shadowed  surroundings  that  would 
thrill  any  mind  sensitive  to  the  mysteries  of 
alien  faiths,  peoples,  and  antiquity. 

At  the  threshold  of  the  Temple,  we  discarded 
our  shoes  and  with  noiseless  steps  wandered 
through  the  hallowed  precincts  of  the  old 
Ginkaku-ji,  the  Silver  Pavilion.  In  the 
apartments  once  lived  the  great  beau  ideal 
Yoshimasa,  eighth  of  the  Ashikaga  shoguns. 
It  was  built  as  a  palatial  retreat  from  the  world 


172      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

for  the  regal  old  aesthete  bent  upon  discovering 
therein  a  creative  sestheticism  of  life.  We 
were  shown  the  tiny  suite  in  which  he  pursued 
his  consecrated  existence  of  beautific  sensual- 
ism. Here  is  one  little  room  in  which  he  ex- 
perimented with  the  ethereal  art  of  incense- 
sniffing,  and  the  adjoining  little  room  is  the 
immemorial  tea-room  wherein  the  first  Cha-no- 
yu  was  held. 

Yoshimasa  with  the  collaboration  of  the 
priest  Shuko  and  the  painter  Soami  here  for- 
mulated the  first  ideals  and  ritual  for  that  Tea 
Ceremony  which  was  destined  to  evolve  and 
consummate  about  itself  all  the  fine  arts  of 
Japan.  Yoshimasa  can  be  said  to  have  in- 
augurated the  custom  of  tea-drinking  in  Japan 
with  his  ecstasy  of  the  senses,  Shuko  to  have 
exalted  it  with  his  sacramentalism  of  the  spirit, 
and  Soami  to  have  endowed  it  with  his  decora- 
tive aastheticism. 

The  place  of  the  origination  of  the  Cha-no- 
yu  is  of  everlasting  interest.  The  old  Zen 
building  is  made  of  cypress  wood  that  has  a 
silvery  sheen,  like  the  glamour  of  grey  age,  and 
stands  in  the  midst  of  what  the  Japanese  call 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     173 

"natural  gardens."  The  Japanese  idea  of  the 
natural  is  exquisitely  whimsical.  They  attain 
what  is  esteemed  so  greatly  as  a  "natural  ef- 
fect" by  the  artificial  gnarling  of  a  dwarfed 
tree,  or  by  meticulous  flower-arrangements  in 
which  every  leaf  is  posed,  every  stalk  bent,  and 
most  of  the  blossoms  eliminated  as  superfluous. 
Nature  to  us  seems  crazy  with  its  waste,  super- 
fluity, excess,  and  unruliness;  but  to  the  Jap- 
anese Nature  means  restraint,  simplicity,  econ- 
omy, and  a  regulated  irregularity. 

The  natural  gardens  of  the  Ginkaku-ji  are 
carefully  wrought  into  rugged  picturesqueness 
against  the  background  of  a  hill  clad  in  sombre 
green.  Near  the  entrance  are  two  odd-looking 
mounds  which  the  guide  will  tell  you  are  the 
Silver  Sand  Platform  where  Yoshimasa  used 
"to  sit  and  hold  aesthetic  revels,"  and  the  moon- 
gazing  mound  where  the  old  priests  and  sho- 
guns  used  to  sit  and  moon-gaze  through  the 
night.  Doubtless,  dreaming  fancies  for  their 
written  poetry  or  fanciful  elaborations  for  the 
ever-glorifying  Cha-no-yu. 

We  walked  about  the  gardens  conducted  by 
a  little  shaven-headed  "embryo  priest."  Upon 


174      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

everything — the  crooked  little  paths  and 
gloomy  distorted  trees  and  the  still  pond  with 
its  humpy  bridges,  tiny-islets  and  "soul- 
informed  rocks,"  there  was  the  grey  of  distance, 
the  ghostliness  of  time,  and  the  pressure  of 
strange  quiet.  The  spirit  of  Yoshimasa,  the 
dead  voluptuary  of  dreams,  seems  to  haunt  his 
ancient  garden;  and  to  hush  hurry  and  quell 
tumult  in  the  minds  of  its  visitors  as  the  ex- 
treme of  bad  taste,  at  least. 

As  we  stood  beside  the  pond  in  unaccus- 
tomed silence,  staring  at  the  mirror  of  nature 
that  had  reflected  so  many  vain  and  fleeting 
faces  of  man,  the  stillness  was  suddenly  bro- 
ken by  the  embryo  priest  who  clapped  his  hands 
to  summon  the  golden  carp  to  the  surface ;  and 
the  waters  were  pricked  with  air-bubbles  from 
the  rising  throats  of  the  sacred  fish  as  we  cast 
out  bits  of  rice  cake  upon  them. 

When  we  returned  to  the  Temple  we  were 
served  by  the  old  priests  with  the  ceremonial 
tea  of  the  Cha-no-yu.  We  sat  upon  the  floor 
on  straw  mats  and  watched  the  curious  process 
of  tea-making.  Nowadays  at  the  Ginkaku-ji 
everything  is  eliminated  from  the  regular  pro- 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     175 

ceedings  of  the  Cha-no-yu  except  the  actual 
making  and  drinking  of  the  tea.  The  foreign 
invasion  of  Japan  has  brought  about  such  ab- 
breviations in  all  the  public  proceedings  for 
foreign  benefit. 

The  Matsu-cha  or  sacred  tea  consists  of  a 
green  powder  made  from  grounded  tea  leaves. 
Its  proper  infusion  was  finally  made  by  the  old 
priest,  whipped  into  froth,  and  poured  into  lit- 
tle black  bowls  that  were  handed  to  us  to  drain 
as  etiquette  required.  No  sugar  or  cream  is 
used  for  tea  in  Japan  but  little  bean  cakes  were 
given  us  now  which  Miseroki,  our  faithful  con- 
ductor through  the  mysteries  of  Japan,  consid- 
erately explained  "is  to  sweeten  the  mouth  for 
the  tea."  Without  this  tempering  of  its  gall- 
like  bitterness,  I  daresay  I  could  not  have  per- 
formed my  feat  of  drinking  the  pseudo-heav- 
enly beverage  which  requires  so  much  imagina- 
tion to  appreciate. 

As  I  sipped  my  tea,  with  politeness  and  curi- 
osity, I  looked  up  and  noticed  a  scroll-picture 
that  hung  upon  the  wall  facing  us.  It  por- 
trayed a  subject  which  soon  becomes  a  familiar 
one  in  Japan,  for  it  is  encountered  constantly 


176      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

upon  the  walls  of  monasteries  and  curio-shops. 
The  face  of  Daruma,  unparalleled  saint  and 
first  Tea-god,  was  that  which  looked  down 
upon  us  from  the  Kakemono,  and  it  seemed  a 
point  in  the  Japanese  scheming  fitness  of 
things  that  this  Divinity  should  preside  over 
the  initiation  of  "foreign  devils"  into  the  beati- 
tude of  tea.  As  I  met  the  dreadful  stare  of 
Daruma's  lidless  red-rimmed  eyes,  the  eyes  of 
tea-tremens  and  insomnia,  I  remembered  the 
legend  about  him  and  with  supplementations 
from  Miseroki,  it  was  retold  now  to  all. 

We  responded  to  the  droll  old  legend  by 
clinking  our  cups  together,  western-fashion, 
and  finished  our  tea-drinking  as  a  toast  to  the 
eternal  peace  of  "good  old  Daruma":  a  vulgar- 
ity, perhaps,  which  disgusted  the  old  priest  sit- 
ting beside  us  in  vigilant  patience  for  tipping- 
time. 

Tea  was  introduced  into  Japan  from  China 
by  Buddhist  priests  (first  in  the  eighth  century, 
then  again  in  the  twelfth)  and  with  it  they 
brought  their  legend  of  the  Saint  Daruma. 
Daruma  was  a  priest  who  attained  the  dizziest 
heights  of  sainthood  by  performing  one  of  the 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     177 

feats  of  virtue  that  abound  in  all  sacred  lore, 
East  and  West.  As  the  legend  runs,  Daruma 
sat  in  prayer  immovably  for  nine  years  until 
his  legs  "rotted  and  fell  off  him,"  and  the  divine 
man  was  known  to  have  erred  only  once  in  a 
human  way.  Once,  while  at  his  religious  exer- 
cises, he  succumbed  to  the  temptation  of  sleep 
and  upon  awakening,  he  was  so  horrified  at  his 
dereliction  that  straightway  he  cut  off  his  eye- 
lids as  a  sure  precaution  against  its  recurrence. 
From  the  severed  eyelids  of  Daruma  the  tea 
plant  is  said  to  have  sprung. 

Until  the  time  of  Yoshimasa,  tea-drinking 
was  confined  to  the  priests  and  religious  orders. 
And  they  valued  it  solely  as  a  remedy  against 
the  sinister  sleepiness  so  liable  to  overcome  a 
holy  man  at  his  long  prayers,  vigils  and  med- 
itations. Then  when  the  religions  were  all  at 
war  with  one  another  in  Japan,  Zennism, 
Shintoism,  Taoism  and  the  various  other  isms 
of  strange  faith,  tea  drinking  was  discovered 
to  serve  another  purpose  for  the  godly  elect. 
With  tea  drinking  as  the  excuse,  it  was  found 
that  gatherings  could  be  formed  to  bring  about 
pacific  discussions  and  social  amenities  that 


178      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

smoothed  the  troubled  waters  of  religious  dis- 
sension. The  teacup  was  thus  made  the  loving 
cup  of  society  during  the  times  of  social  up- 
heaval. Later,  during  a  long  period  of  peace 
(the  great  fifteenth  century),  it  fell  into  the 
aesthetic  hands  of  Yoshimasa,  who  made  of  it 
the  inspiration  for  the  great  Art  development 
and  Art  worship  of  his  country. 

It  was  first  brought  to  Yoshimasa  by  the 
priest  Shuko  of  the  Temple  of  Stomjoji. 
Shuko  had  discovered  in  himself  the  priestly 
failing  of  sleepiness  when  at  his  devotions,  and 
a  medicine  man  in  the  order  had  recommended 
tea  drinking  as  the  new  remedy.  "It  will 
fortify  the  heart  so  that  you  will  not  need 
sleep,"  Shuko  was  assured.  He  at  once  com- 
municated his  discovery  to  the  royal  experi- 
menter of  novelties  Yoshimasa,  who,  in  return 
for  his  service,  constituted  Shuko  the  first  Cha- 
jin,  Tea-expert  and  Master  of  polite  cere- 
monies of  the  Cha-no-ju. 

After  him  there  came  a  long  series  of  Cha- 
jin  during  what  is  now  called  the  Golden  Age 
of  the  Cha-no-yu.  The  old  Tea-masters  each 
tried  to  excel  his  predecessors  by  adding  new 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     179 

values,  ideals  and  beauties  to  the  Tea- Cere- 
mony or  to  Teaism,  its  Credo.  The  arts  of 
flower-arrangement,  of  painting  and  pottery 
and  bronze  and  ceramics,  all  attained  their  per- 
fection in  the  inspiring  atmosphere  of  the  Tea- 
room. The  Cha-no-yu  has  been  the  supreme 
influence  in  evolving  the  wonderful  Art  and  the 
no  less  wonderful  etiquette  of  Japan. 

Etiquette  is  the  play  of  old  people  and  the 
hypocrisy  of  the  young.  We  Americans  are 
too  young  to  be  sincere  in  any  of  the  formalities 
etiquette  demands;  and  the  Japanese  are  old 
enough  to  find  the  grace  of  movement  in  its  stiff 
canons.  The  school  of  Japanese  etiquette  is 
quite  as  impresisve  and  extraordinary  as  the 
school  of  Tea;  in  fact  the  two  belong  to  each 
other  as  a  social  expression  of  the  cultivated 
Japanese  soul.  The  Ogasawara  thus  defines 
the  aim  of  the  Japanese  school  of  etiquette : 

"The  end  of  all  etiquette  is  to  so  cultivate 
your  mind  that  even  when  you  are  quietly 
seated  not  the  roughest  ruffian  can  dare  make 
onset  on  your  person." 

Etiquette  to  the  Japanese  is  a  sort  of  moral 
hygiene  that  takes  the  place  of  what  we  West- 


180      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

erners  call  "morals"  in  exercising  the  power  of 
an  undeviating  rule  of  conduct.  Individual- 
ity has  no  scope  in  Japanese  etiquette,  just  as 
individuality  has  no  scope  in  Western  morals. 
One  measure  is  for  all  sizes  and  shapes  of  be- 
ing. The  laws  of  Japanese  etiquette  are  based 
on  politeness,  self-control  and  that  cultivated 
aesthetic  instinct  which  gives  the  good-taste  that 
inevitably  creates  good  form. 

But  at  one  time  the  Tea-Ceremony  devel- 
oped the  Western  disease  of  exaggeration  and 
extravagance.  This  violated  the  conservative 
spirit  of  Japan  and  seemed  an  anarchy  against 
the  sovereign  sweetness  and  refinement  of  the 
Japanese  soul.  Poets  tiraded  against  the  evils 
that  had  crept  into  the  Cha-no-yu.  It  had 
grown  expensive,  over-elaborate  and  full  of 
ostentation  and  affectations.  The  evils  were 
recognized  at  a  time  when  the  country  was  im- 
poverished by  a  long  period  of  wars.  Insur- 
gent aesthetes  arose  everywhere  to  declare  that 
the  Cha-no-yu  had  become  a  decadent  institu- 
tion which  ignored  the  realities  of  life.  The 
pristine  quality  of  "nature"  and  truth  no 
longer  existed  in  it.  It  had  developed  un- 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     181 

wholesomely  out  of  touch  with  surrounding  hu- 
manity in  its  lowly  condition,  and  so  had  lost 
the  fine  ethical  element  indispensable  for  true 
social  grace  and  the  highest  inspirations  of  art. 
A  reformation  of  the  Cha-no-yu  then  took 
place. 

The  old  Cha-jin  Rikyu,  whom  many  say  was 
the  greatest  of  the  great  Tea-masters,  became 
the  Martin  Luther  in  the  Reformation  of  the 
Tea  room.  Into  its  overdone  atmosphere  he 
brought  an  air  of  simplicity  and  poverty  like  a 
clean  breath  of  Nature.  Rikyu  declared  the 
first  essentials  for  a  tea  party  to  be  purity, 
peacefulness,  reverence  and  abstraction,  and 
gave  these  quaint  rules  and  precepts  for  its 
conduct : 

1st.  As  soon  as  the  guests  are  assembled  on 
the  bench  they  announce  themselves  by  knock- 
ing on  the  Don  (wooden  gong) . 

2nd.  It  is  important  (on  entering)  to  have 
not  only  a  clean  face  and  hands  but  chiefly  a 
clean  heart. 

3rd.  The  host  must  meet  his  guests  and 
conduct  them  in.  If  on  account  of  the  host's 
poverty,  he  cannot  give  them  the  tea  and  neces- 


182      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

saries  for  the  table,  or  if  the  eatables  be  taste- 
less, or  even  if  the  trees  and  rocks  do  not  please 
him,  he  (the  guest)  can  leave  at  once.  (Since 
politeness  is  the  first  requirement  of  good- 
breeding  this  doubtless  never  occurred.) 

4th.  As  soon  as  the  water  makes  a  sound 
like  the  wind  in  the  fir-trees,  and  the  bell  rings, 
the  guests  should  return,  for  bad  would  it  be 
to  forget  the  right  moment  for  the  water  and 
the  fire. 

5th.  It  is  forbidden,  since  long  ago,  to  speak 
in  or  out  of  the  house  of  anything  worldly  (in 
this  category  comes  political  conversation,  and 
especially  scandal) .  The  only  thing  is  the  Tea 
and  the  Tea  Societies. 

6th.  No  guest  or  host  may,  in  any  true,  pure 
meeting,  flatter  either  by  word  or  deed. 

7th.  A  meeting  may  not  last  longer  than 
two  hours  (2  Japanese  hours  equal  4  Euro- 
pean hours). 

Notice — Let  the  time  pass  by  in  talking 
about  these  rules  and  maxims.  The  Tea  So- 
cieties recognize  no  difference  of  social  stand- 
ing, but  permit  free  intercourse  between  high 
and  low. 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN    183 

Written  in  the  12th  year  of  Tensho  (1584) 
and  the  ninth  day  of  the  ninth  month. 

The  adoption  of  the  rules  and  standards  of 
Rikyu  became  the  fashion  in  old  Japan.  Re- 
fined poverty  in  the  appearance  and  appoint- 
ments of  the  tea  room  constituted  the  best  style 
and  taste.  The  surroundings  of  nature  or  un- 
adorned simplicity  within  walls  were  the  acme 
of  elegance,  and  the  plainest  materials,  rough 
pottery  and  hand-moulded  utensils,  were  used 
for  the  Cha-no-yu.  Consequently,  human  na- 
ture asserted  itself  in  the  usual  way,  even  in 
Japan  where  humility  is  chic,  and  soon  the 
cheapest-looking  utensils  became  in  fact  the 
costliest,  the  crude  pottery  in  reality  the  most 
luxurious,  and  an  artistic  air  of  poverty  the 
most  difficult  and  expensive  to  obtain.  But 
this  is  a  long  and  complex  story  that  has  left 
its  record  upon  all  the  arts  of  Japan. 

Rikyu  is  now  regarded  and  venerated  as 
the  restorer  of  the  temporarily  lost  art  of  po- 
liteness in  Japan.  The  true  spirit  of  polite- 
ness surely  consists  in  the  humble  adaptation 
of  one's  self  to  the  condition  of  others,  rather 
than  in  the  ostentatious  patronage  of  others, 


184      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

such  as  we  have  in  the  West.  The  old  Tea- 
reformer  taught  the  arrogant  rich  of  his  day 
the  eestheticism  of  economy.  Really,  economy 
is  but  another  word  for  the  reserve  without 
which  there  is  no  efficiency  in  force.  In  de- 
portment the  economy  of  force  means  grace; 
in  art  the  economy  of  force  means  mastery. 

There  are  now  many  schools  of  Teaism  in 
modern  Japan,  each  of  which  claims  precedence 
over  the  other.  And  the  youth  of  both  sexes 
are  thoroughly  instructed  in  the  conventions 
and  deportment  of  the  Tea- Ceremony  as  their 
chief  social  accomplishment.  Years  of  train- 
ing are  necessary  in  order  to  master  the  culture 
and  practice  of  the  Cha-no-yu,  which,  to  West- 
ern eyes,  seems  such  a  Pomp  and  Pageant  of 
Much- Ado- About-Nothing. 

The  schools  differ  in  little  points  of  tea- 
etiquette,  and,  in  some  places,  society  is  di- 
vided into  snobbish  sets,  claiming  superiority 
over  each  other,  by  the  adoption  of  one  or  the 
other  method  of  tea-conduct.  The  points  of 
difference  often  seem  absurd ;  for  instance,  one 
modern  school  says  that  the  guest  must  make  a 
loud  sucking  noise  in  swallowing  the  tea,  thus 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     185 

complimenting  host  or  hostess  by  an  audible 
enjoyment;  but  the  more  popular  schools  say 
the  process  must  be  noiseless.  The  Japanese 
aversion  to  noise  is  so  marked  that  they  employ 
the  adjective  "noisy"  as  a  term  for  dislike  or 
tastelessness.  "Noisy"  flowers  are  those  which 
do  not  harmonize  with  their  surroundings. 

Nowadays  when  the  Japanese  men  have  lost 
their  former  leisureliness  and  respect  for  punc- 
tilio— through  the  industrialism  imported  from 
the  West — the  old-time  glory  of  the  Cha-no-yu 
is  chiefly  maintained  by  the  women,  the  ladies 
of  high  degree.  After  my  tea-initiation  in 
Kyoto  it  was  my  good  fortune  to  participate  in 
a  private  Cha-no-yu  given  by  an  ultra-fashion- 
able lady  at  her  home  in  Nagasaki.  Inci- 
dentally, the  same  day,  previous  to  the  tea- 
party,  an  "American  luncheon"  was  given  us 
by  a  progressive  Japanese  in  which  the  plat  de 
surprise  was  an  "ice  cream"  made  of  the  Matsu- 
cha,  the  sacred  green  powder  tea.  The  Jap- 
anese consider  the  Americans  a  frozen  nation, 
gastronomically  and  aesthetically. 

The  tea-party  took  place  at  a  delightful  doll- 
like  house,  on  the  roadway  of  the  Mogi — all 


186      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

made  of  painted  screens,  bamboo  and  crypto- 
meria,  and  set  in  the  heart  of  a  garden  that 
would  have  entranced  Kubla  Khan.  Its  se- 
rene seclusion  was  hidden  by  a  high  bamboo 
fence  over  which  the  passersby  on  the  roadway 
could  glimpse  nothing  except  a  Magnolia  tree 
in  bloom  and  a  lofty  cluster  of  growing  bam- 
boo, pale,  frail,  straight  and  forever  young, 
the  ideal  lady  of  horticulture. 

It  was  March.  In  the  ides  of  this  season 
Japan  clothes  itself  in  grey.  Next  month  will 
usher  in  the  radiance  of  the  cherry  blossom 
season  and  to  relish  to  the  full  its  festival  of 
color,  Japan  prepares  itself  by  a  fast  of  grey. 
The  everlasting  green  hills  wear  veils  of  fog. 
The  skies  are  a  deliquescent  oyster-shell  in 
which  gleams  a  hidden  pearl,  the  sun.  The 
streets  and  the  houses,  and  everything  is  grey 
except  the  bright  kimonas  of  the  children  and 
the  maikos,  and  an  occasional  burst  of  preco- 
cious bloom. 

In  the  gardens  spring  announced  itself  in 
the  shimmer  of  the  white  plum  trees  and  in  the 
heavy  red  lips  of  the  Magnolia  blossoms.  The 
grassless  ground  was  strewn  with  pine  needles, 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     187 

a  charming  Japanese  device  to  gain  a  "natural 
effect,"  and  with  mossgrown  rocks.  Through 
the  grey  vista  I  could  see  the  rain-washed 
bronze  of  a  small  Daibutsu,  and  further  on  the 
misty  outlines  of  a  Torii  and  the  glint  of  a 
gold-roofed  Pagoda. 

At  the  portico  of  the  house  I  was  greeted 
by  a  bowing  little  figure  dressed  in  grey,  and 
on  entering  the  reception  room  I  encountered 
two  more  bowing  little  figures  in  grey,  my 
hostess  and  her  honorable  guests.  At  every 
word  of  my  attempted  conversation  the  gentle 
ladies  responded  with  profound  bows  and  im- 
placable smiles,  and  my  hostess  lisped  "yes" 
to  every  word,  for  she  had  had  a  "modern  edu- 
cation," so  her  husband  had  proudly  declaimed 
to  us!  and  "spoke  English." 

The  quaint  beings  seemed  absurdly  alike  to 
me;  all  top-heavy  with  their  rolls  of  shiny  black 
hair,  all  yellow  faces,  wide  and  blank,  with  in- 
scrutable, crooked  little  eyes,  and  their  bodies, 
grotesquely  sexless,  seemed  mummy-like  in  the 
grey  kimonas,  tight  about  the  extremities, 
identically  alike  in  make  and  color,  with  their 
family  crests  embroidered  upon  the  huge 


188      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

sleeves.  Suddenly  the  three  little  figures 
struck  me  as  representing  the  universal  ideal 
of  female  perfection:  dogmatic,  colorless  little 
figures,  childest  in  mind  and  aged  in  conven- 
tion, at  once  charming  and  ridiculous. 

I  had  prepared  myself  for  the  tea  party  by 
assiduous  inquiry  in  order  to  avoid  the  usual 
American  Malapropisms  among  foreigners. 
It  was  a  relief  to  find  that  the  rules  of  the  Cha- 
no-yu  so  regulate  the  conversation  and  move- 
ments that  there  is  little  leeway  for  a  faux  pas. 
Silence  is  compulsory  at  certain  long  periods 
during  the  proceedings,  then  comments  of  an 
appointed  order  are  allowed,  then  specified  sub- 
jects must  be  discussed  in  the  classic  manner, 
et  cetera.  And  the  tea  party  that  now  took 
place  was  a  faithful  exemplar  of  all  the  formal 
tea  parties  taking  place  among  the  Japanese 
ladies  of  this  forceful  twentieth  century. 

When  the  elaborate  salutations  were  over, 
the  hostess  slid  open  a  panel  in  the  wall  and 
knelt  beside  the  low  doorway  as  her  guests 
passed  through  it  into  the  tea  room.  The  tea 
room  is  invariably  of  an  orthodox  size,  six  feet 
square,  partitioned  off  from  the  reception  or 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     189 

drawing  room.  Its  name,  the  Sukiya,  means 
the  Abode  of  Fancy. 

The  tea  room  was  the  conventional  one, 
without  furnishings  or  adornments  except  the 
four  straw  mats  on  the  floor,  the  open  brazier 
in  the  centre,  and  the  vase  of  flowers  and  scroll- 
painting  in  the  Tokomona,  the  recess  within 
the  wall. 

The  grey-garbed  figures  knelt  before  the 
Tokomona  and  made  obeisances  before  it,  and 
exchanged  softly  spoken  words  which,  as  I 
knew,  were  the  precise  words  expressing  the 
precise  thoughts  and  emotions  which  their 
mothers  and  great,  great-grandmothers  used 
when  they  too  once  worshipped  in  the  tea  room 
the  beauty  of  the  flowers,  of  the  vase  and  of 
the  picture,  the  beauty  of  the  spirit  of  Art  it- 
self enshrined  for  its  Japanese  devotees  within 
the  tiny  Tokomona. 

In  households  that  observe  the  finest  modes 
of  artistic  living,  the  picture  and  the  flower  in 
the  Tokomona  are  changed  punctiliously  sev- 
eral times  a  day  in  order  that  their  coloring 
should  harmonize  with  the  varying  light  of  the 
hours. 


190      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

While  her  guests  were  preoccupied  in  their 
studious  ecstasy  before  the  adornments  of  the 
Tokomona,  the  hostess  noiselessly  withdrew 
from  the  tea  room  to  go  and  fetch  the  materials 
for  the  fire  making  and  tea  making. 

All  the  menial  tasks  must  be  performed  by 
the  hostess  herself;  for  since  the  wholesome 
castigation  of  the  severe  old  Tea-master  Rikyii, 
the  Cha-no-yu  means  the  idealization  of  the 
mundane  and  the  lowly. 

The  hostess  returned  carrying  a  little  basket 
full  of  the  fire  materials :  bits  of  charcoal  of  the 
prescribed  shape  and  size,  the  feather-duster, 
the  fire-tongs  or  Hibashi,  and  other  mysterious 
minutiae  She  walked  very  slowly,  for  every 
step  must  be  carefully  measured  according  to 
rigorous  rule.  Just  so  many  steps  must  be 
taken  to  reach  the  brazier  from  the  threshold, 
and  just  so  many  movements  must  be  made  in 
order  to  attain  every  little  end  in  the  stately 
infinitesimal  proceedings  thereon.  Otherwise 
she  commits  a  lapse  from  honored  propriety 
that  may  well  mar  her  social  prestige  forever. 
Back  and  forth,  with  her  rote-timed  air,  the 
silken,  shadow-toned  figure  passed  until  all  the 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     191 

essential  things  were  in  the  tea  room  and  ar- 
ranged about  the  fireplace. 

The  hostess  then  knelt  beside  the  fireplace, 
her  guests  around  her  in  a  sphinx-eyed  circle. 
She  lifted  the  kettle  off  the  trivet,  which  was 
the  signal  for  them  to  break  the  respectful  si- 
lence, to  ask  permission  to  see  the  making  of 
the  fire,  and  to  slip  nearer  her  upon  the  mats 
for  the  homely  rite  which  the  Japanese  sanctify 
with  art. 

It  is  a  dainty  process — the  making  of  a  fire- 
in  the  empiric  little  hands  of  a  Nipponese  lady ! 

First  she  dusted  the  brazier  with  an  eagle's 
feather,  and  arranged  the  burning  embers  as 
though  they  were  flowers  from  which  her  sub- 
tle fingers  wished  to  procure  a  "natural  effect." 
On  top  of  the  red  glow  she  placed  bits  of 
charred  rhododendron  and  then  a  white  lime- 
coated  twig  of  azalea.  The  finishing  touch  was 
a  pinch  of  powder  which  she  took  from  the 
Ko-bako,  the  incense  box,  and  sprinkled  upon 
the  fire.  Suddenly  the  air  was  filled  with  a 
bewildering  fragrance;  at  which  it  was  in- 
cumbent upon  the  guests  to  break  again  the 
homage  of  silence  and  to  conjecture  decorously 


192      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

among  themselves  as  to  the  name  and  kind  of 
incense  used.  The  incense  box  was  handed  to 
them  to  examine.  This  is  always  a  beautiful 
piece  of  art  and  workmanship,  usually  in 
bronze  or  Cloisonne. 

The  hostess  then  drew  a  purple  silk  cloth 
from  the  bosom  of  her  kimona  and — with  con- 
fusing intricacy  of  motion — proceeded  to  wipe 
all  the  utensils  for  the  tea-making  with  as  much 
care  as  though  they  were  not  already  impec- 
cably clean.  The  purple  cloth  must  always  be 
drawn  forth,  used,  refolded  and  put  back  in  her 
bosom  in  unimpeachable,  stereotyped  ways.  A 
piece  of  white  crepe  paper  was  then  given  to 
each  guest  to  be  used  for  wrapping  up  and 
taking  away  what  portions  of  the  food  they 
could  not  eat. 

Next  the  tea  bowl  was  scalded  out,  the  bam- 
boo-whisk rinsed  with  infinite  care,  and  three 
or  four  teaspoonsful  of  the  green  powder  tea 
were  taken  from  a  jar,  put  in  the  bowl  and 
hot  water  (boiling  water  is  never  used  for  tea 
in  Japan)  poured  upon  it.  The  infusion  was 
beaten  up  with  the  bamboo-whisk;  a  delicate 
process  that  requires  long  and  patient  prac- 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     193 

tice  for  the  whisk  must  be  held  with  a  certain 
turn  of  the  wrist  difficult  to  acquire  and  just 
so  many  turns  must  be  made  with  it  in  order 
to  achieve  the  superlative  decree  of  the  "froth 
of  the  liquid  jade." 

The  bamboo-whisk  resembles  the  occidental 
shaving  brush;  and  it  has  aroused  indignation 
among  the  Japanese  aesthetes  that  it  has  been 
imported  into  America  to  be  used  here  in  the 
drinking  bars  for  frothing  cocktails  and  other 
vulgar,  soul-dissipating  drinks. 

The  hostess  finally  handed  the  tea  bowl  to 
her  first  most  honorable  guest,  and  I  took  a 
sip  of  the  pungent  contents  and  passed  it  on 
to  the  next  most  honorable  guest.  Her  en- 
suing niceties  of  behavior  at  once  informed  me 
of  my  clumsy  Western  ignorance  of  the  art 
that  can  be  made  even  from  a  sip  of  tea.  She 
seemed  to  go  through  the  cabalistic  signs  of  an 
unknown  Cult  as  she  took  the  bowl  from  my 
hands,  lifted  it  slowly  to  her  forehead,  low- 
ered it,  took  three  sips  from  it,  wiped  the  edge 
of  the  bowl  and  passed  it  on  to  her  neighbor, 
like  a  loving-cup  solemn  with  Olympian  nec- 
tar. The  sips  must  be  exactly  measured  so 


194      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

that  the  last  one  who  drinks  will  drain  the  bowl 
with  her  three  sips. 

At  last  the  tea-sipping  and  cake-nibbling 
with  their  lengthy  corollaries  were  over,  and 
the  hostess  began  her  apologies  for  the  poor 
quality  of  the  tea,  for  the  food  and  for  all  the 
materials  used  in  the  tea  ceremony.  And  one 
by  one  all  the  implements  were  handed  around 
to  receive  the  admiring  criticisms  of  the  guests. 

On  the  top  wave  of  apology  and  eulogy,  the 
hostess  withdrew  from  the  tea  room,  apparently 
to  take  away  the  tea  things,  but  also  to  provide 
the  opportunity  for  a  private  discussion  among 
the  guests  of  her  conduct  of  the  Cha-no-yu. 
The  "talking  behind  her  back"  is  of  course 
overheard  through  the  paper  walls  and  maybe 
is  the  most  enjoyable  moment  of  the  whole 
occasion  to  the  Japanese  ladies,  whose  faultless 
politeness  makes  them  appear  so  meekly  self- 
obliterative. 

The  return  of  the  hostess  signified  the  termi- 
nation of  our  tea  party.  Again  she  knelt  de- 
voutly beside  the  doorway  as  her  honorable 
guests  with  more  compliments  and  low  bow- 
ing, made  their  departure. 


A  CUP  OF  TEA  IN  JAPAN     195 

Necessarily  I  have  omitted  many  marvels 
of  detail  in  the  Cha-no-yu,  and  the  one  I  at- 
tended was  shortened  out  of  deference  to  my 
hurried  nationality.  Among  themselves  the 
Japanese  ladies  extend  the  proceedings 
through  unlimited  hours,  and  certainly  it  seems 
to  be  an  ideal  vent  through  channels  of  gentil- 
ity for  woman's  irrepressible  orgy-instinct. 

There  may  indeed  be  a  lesson  for  us  West- 
erners in  the  revelation  the  Cha-no-yu  conveys, 
of  how  the  Japanese  have  made  values  of  peace, 
harmony,  courtesy,  and  beauty  out  of  life's 
simplest  things,  and  find  in  the  smallest  tea 
room  the  sweet,  worshipful  mood  for  a  sub- 
lime Art  of  Life. 


MR.  GRUNDY  AND  EVE'S  DRESS 
(In  1914) 

IN  childhood  we  value  our  parents  because 
we  believe  in  them;  in  maturity  we  value 
them  because  we  can  blame  them.  The  first 
parents  in  this  world  are  unforgettable  because 
most  human  failings  can  be  blamed  upon  Old 
Adam  and  Mother  Eve.  To-day  there  is  a 
hubbub  about  dress.  Sumptuary  legislation 
has  been  proposed  and  some  actually  enacted, 
in  a  valiant  attempt  to  make  the  new-fashioned 
woman's  attire  accord  with  the  old-fashioned 
man's  views. 

Does  mankind  change? 

Way  back  in  the  Garden  of  Eden  the  first 
man  inaugurated  this  crusade  against  woman's 
dress.  Milton  tells  us  that  after  God's  gift  to 
Adam  of  Eve — "with  perfect  beauty  adorned," 
in  all  the  majestic  lowliness  of  nature — in  his 
first  confidential  chat  with  the  Creator  about 
her,  Adam  complained  that  Nature — 

196 


EVE'S  DRESS  197 

" — from  my  side  subtracting,  took  perhaps 
More  than  enough — at  least  on  her  bestowed 
Too  much  of  ornament,  in  outward  show 
Elaborate,  of  inward  less  exact." 

Since  his  divinely  made-to-order  spouse  did 
not  possess  "a  dress  to  her  name"  or  an  orna- 
ment or  even  a  wedding  ring  or  a  fig-leaf  at 
that  time,  this  conjugal  criticism  of  her  excess 
in  ornament  and  outward  show  does  indeed 
seem  to  warrant  the  sigh  of  every  future  Eve 
in  humankind:  "Is  there  any  pleasing  him?" 

In  this  question  of  dress  is  hidden  the  little 
key  to  many  big  enigmas.  At  least  here  is  the 
instrumentality  which  has  enabled  man  to 
achieve  a  complete  transposition  in  the  sex- 
prerogatives.  Nature  intended  woman  to  be 
the  arbitrary  agent  of  selection  in  the  mating 
of  the  sexes,  but  the  conditions  of  her  destiny 
were  so  arranged  that  this  aim  was  defeated, 
and  man  usurped  the  sovereignty  of  choice. 
Throughout  the  animal  kingdom  the  godly  in- 
tent is  plainly  manifest  by  the  male's  exclusive 
endowment  of  the  magnetizing  externals. 
The  dazzling  colors  and  thrilling  songs  and 
gorgeously  spread  tails  and  hirsute  adornments 


198      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

all  belong  to  him  as  his  stock-in-trade  in  the 
game  of  sex,  by  means  of  which  he  may  or  may 
not  win  the  plainly  garbed,  songless  little  fe- 
male. The  male  rivalry  for  her  favor  and  the 
exactions  of  her  aesthetic  taste  are  clearly  the 
influences  which  developed  the  male's  beauty 
and  superior  might.  Nature  seemed  wise  in 
making  of  the  female  the  sanctuary  of  the 
beauty  and  strength  of  the  race;  she  seemed 
safe  in  trusting  to  the  vestal  fires  of  her  aesthetic 
sense ;  with  its  f astidiosities,  refinements,  admi- 
rations and  rejections  based  upon  that  instinc- 
tive feeling  which  is  exercised  only  in  physical 
and  spiritual  freedom.  A  wise  and  safe  plan 
it  seemed,  but  man  has  never  approved  of 
scheming  Nature. 

The  economic,  religious,  social  and  domestic 
systems  of  every  land  and  civilization  have  been 
especially  contrived  to  despoil  woman  of  her 
one  great  primal  right,  her  right  of  choice. 
She  has  been  made  the  chosen  instead  of  the 
chooser.  And  through  so  many  ages — is  it  any 
wonder  we  find,  now,  that  she  has  lost  also  her 
aesthetic  sense,  that  world-beautifying  and 


EVE'S  DRESS  199 

health-giving  little  appendage  attached  to 
woman's  mating-right? 

Man  has  never  conquered  woman  by  his 
strength  but  by  his  subtlety.  The  master- 
stroke of  genius  in  subjugating  her  was  in  his 
making  her  love  dress  and  decoration  in  her- 
self instead  of — as  nature  intended — in  man. 
Hence  the  complete  transposition  in  the  orig- 
inal sex-roles,  from  the  male's  desire  and  effort 
to  please  the  female's  senses  to  the  female's  de- 
sire and  effort  to  please  the  male's  senses;  so 
evident  to-day. 

Woman  is  now  the  decorative  sex,  mastered, 
and  living  under  the  thrall  of  dress  and  fash- 
ion, more  blighting  to  her  true  nature  in  these 
modern  days  than  any  erstwhile  tyranny  of 
man.  Sometimes  we  have  quaint  signs  of  the 
artificiality  of  these  conditions  and  of  woman's 
obsolete  fundamental  being.  For  instance, 
when  a  woman  greatly  loves,  we  discover  her. 
Few  women  and  fewer  men  are  capable  of  a 
great  true  passion  of  love;  but  when  it  occurs 
in  a  woman,  she  becomes  Woman  magnified, 
and  one  can  then  really  behold  and  interpret 


200      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  eternal  feminine.     When  a  woman  loves, 
it  is  her  instinct  to  become  demure  in  dress. 

The  little  mystic  Cupid  in  every  woman's 
soul  whispers  to  her  that  she  must  be  loved  for 
herself  alone,  she  must  be  simple  and  natural 
and  unadorned;  and  in  the  halcyon  days  of 
mutuality  of  love,  every  girl  or  woman  feels 
a  subconscious  hankering  for  inconspicuous- 
ness  in  dress,  for  the  pure  or  dark  tones,  plain- 
ness, every  approach  to  Nature's  sartorial  ordi- 
nation for  the  female,  in  fact.  And  strange  to 
say — because  so  little  remarked  upon  or  inter- 
preted— the  true  lover  expresses  odd  preju- 
dices against  conspicuous  attire  in  his  sweet- 
heart. He  invariably  shows  himself  most 
pleased  when  she  is  most  demurely  gowned; 
but  neither  can  realize  nor  read  Nature's  ar- 
rows directing  them  to  love's  lost  Arcadias. 
She  sees  him  surrounded  by  bevies  of  fashion- 
able "dressers" ;  he,  perhaps,  fatally,  expresses 
admiration  for  some  stylish  worldling;  she  is 
informed  from  every  side  that  man  is  wooed 
and  won  and  only  kept  as  a  monogamist  by 
woman's  dress.  So  the  amorous  maiden  turns 
deaf  ears  to  the  haunting  ghost  of  her  feminine 


EVE'S  DRESS  201 

heart  and  follows  the  example  of  the  world's 
femininity  who  flaunt  their  clothes  before  man, 
like  designing  little  picadors  egging  on  with 
gay-bannering  a  sight-maddened  Toros. 

Again  in  the  felicitous  wife,  we  see  still  more 
strongly,  the  silk-muffled  instinct.  It  has  been 
so  generally  detected  in  her  that  "woman's  lit- 
erature" is  full  of  observations  and  advice  to 
young  wives  upon  this  point.  The  bride  is 
always  admonished  against  becoming  indiffer- 
ent to  dress.  Now  that  she  has  caught  her 
husband  by  dress,  she  must  hold  him  by  dress, 
is  the  matrimonial  recipe  given  her  by  the  wise- 
acres. Curl  papers  in  the  morning,  and  neg- 
ligees in  the  evening  are  depicted  as  the  rocks 
for  man's  shipwreck  of  illusion,  so  woman  as 
wife  buys  and  hides  false  hair  and  laces  and 
hobbles  like  a  prospective  divorcee.  Her 
honeymoon  days  would  emancipate  woman 
from  the  Despot  Dress  were  it  not  for  woman's 
literature  and  the  advice  of  the  Elders.  When 
woman  loves,  she  is  both  elementary  and  ex- 
alted. She  is  at  once  too  animal  and  too  divine 
to  care  for  dress.  Her  dress  is  for  man;  her 
over-dressing  and  bad-dressing  is  because  she 


202      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

does  not  understand  man;  and  her  captious, 
senseless  changing  of  dress  is  because  she  does 
not  believe  in  man  as  a  monogamist. 

Woman  is  lost  and  astray  in  her  so-called 
woman's  province  of  dress.  With  modern 
education,  she  has  become  conscious  and  dis- 
gusted with  her  blindness  and  errors  in  sesthet- 
icism;  therefore  she  is  expressing  her  general 
dissatisfaction  with  the  scheme  of  things  by 
revolting  against  all  orders  and  rulings  except 
those  of  the  power  that  has  undone  and  ex- 
posed her,  Dress;  the  unrecognized  enemy, 
which  has  made  the  fair  sex  into  a  lonely 
monopolist  of  self-decorations  and  sense-ap- 
peal, chasing,  charming,  capturing  whatsoever 
members  of  the  strong  sex  are  too  weak-willed 
to  escape,  regardless  of  their  sex-attraction  for 
woman  or  their  eugenic  eligibility. 

Why  was  the  olden-time  woman,  of  faded 
ancestral  halls,  more  contented  and  so  much 
less  exigent  and  greedy  than  her  tumultuous 
great  granddaughters?  Her  wrongs  and  ob- 
livion of  sphere  seem  unbearable  to  women  to- 
day, but  certainly  she  had  some  pristine  source 
of  content  denied  to  us.  I  think  it  was — her 


EVE'S  DRESS  203 

admiration  for  man.  She  was  enthralled  by 
admiration  for  man,  aesthetically,  ethically,  and 
intellectually.  A  fanatic  of  adoration,  she  en- 
dured with  poise  the  tyranny  of  this  wonderful, 
all-wise,  highly  decorative  deity,  Man.  The 
clinging,  selfless,  Mid- Victorian  woman  was 
the  cumulative  personality  from  long  eras  of 
woman's  exclusive  admiration  of  man.  When 
man  appeals  to  woman  through  the  senses,  he 
does  not  need  to  hold  her  down  by  statute. 
What  woman  has  not  thrilled  in  some  atavistic 
arcanum  of  her  being,  at  the  representation  of 
some  beautiful  masculine  type  in  man's  heyday 
of  self -decoration  and  display — as  in  a  paint- 
ing by  Van  Dyck — with  its  regalia  of  laces, 
silks,  brocades,  jewels  and  curls,  redeemed  by 
the  ancient  aroma  of  the  aesthetic  male  ?  Even 
to-day  a  woman  gets  a  suggestion  of  the 
primordial  thrill  when  she  gazes  upon  a  parade 
of  men,  gold-buttoned  and  epauletted,  brass- 
banded,  the  true  male  lure  in  life's  game  of  sex. 
But  man  surrendered  his  right  of  self-deco- 
ration and  his  natural  physical  vanity  for  the 
sake  of  his  modern  credo,  Democracy.  The 
first  rumor  of  "Woman's  rights"  is  dated  si- 


204      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

multaneously.     Plain    man    created    discon- 
tented woman. 

Sometimes  it  is  advanced  nowadays  that 
woman  does  not  dress  to  please  man,  but  to 
please  herself.  This  seems  more  consistent 
with  her  present  attitude  of  independence  and 
freedom.  Paola  Lombroso  wrote  a  book  about 
the  female  convicts  in  prisons,  and  her  study  of 
them  seems,  to  many  psychologists,  to  verify 
this  supposition.  She  tells  us  that  "the  prison 
rules  strictly  forbid  the  use  of  powder,  per- 
fumes, cosmetics  and  all  vanities  of  that  order 
to  the  female  convicts"  but  that  in  spite  of 
every  rule,  and  even  in  solitary  confinement, 
they  manage  to  obtain  something  with  which 
to  adorn  their  faces,  by  "patiently  licking  the 
walls  of  the  cells,"  and  from  that  making  a  sort 
of  paste  for  whitening  their  complexions.  She 
mentions  one  who  was  found  one  morning  "her 
face  all  painted  with  red,  like  a  ballerine 
d'opera.  They  could  not  understand  how  she 
had  obtained  that  paint.  Her  cell  was 
searched  in  vain.  Finally  they  discovered  the 
secret.  In  the  stuff  of  which  they  made  the 
camisoles  of  the  prisoners,  was  found  a  red 


EVE'S  DRESS  205 

thread.  This  woman  had  had  the  patience  to 
remove  this  thread,  bit  by  bit.  She  had  soaked 
it  a  long  time  in  the  water  which  it  finally  col- 
ored red." 

This  seems  to  prove  an  incorrigible  instinct 
of  self-decoration  in  woman,  but  it  proves  on 
the  contrary  how  incorrigibly  automatic  she  has 
become  in  her  long  cultivation  of  artificial 
traits.  That  some  women  may  embellish  for 
themselves  does  not  prove  the  nature  or  reality 
of  woman's  aesthetic  sense  any  more  than  the 
abnormality  and  perversion  of  the  maternal 
sense  in  a  hen — which  makes  her  sit  on  glass 
eggs  or  potatoes  as  willingly  as  on  her  own 
future  fledglings — proves  the  nature  of  the  ex- 
istence of  the  maternal  in  all  female  creatures. 

No ;  woman  dresses  to  please  man.  And  as 
she  is  not  yet  developed  sufficiently  in  her 
aesthetic  sense  to  know  how  to  achieve  this  end, 
her  dress  and  fashions  are  designed,  accepted 
or  banned  by  man.  She  has  had  but  one  great 
inspiration  in  dressing  herself,  viz.,  man  is  a 
polygamist.  Hence  the  personal  aim  of  wom- 
an's dress  is  always  newness,  variety,  novelty. 
The  clever  woman  of  the  world  seeks  to  give 


206      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

man  a  new  woman  in  herself  every  season,  so 
new  and  startling  strange  from  footgear  to 
headgear,  that  he — marked  by  Darwin  as  being 
"ready  to  pair  with  any  female" — cannot  rec- 
ognize the  sameness  of  the  old  feminine  core 
concealed  by  the  mutations  of  fashion.  And 
because  a  wife  provides  her  husband  with  a 
harem  of  clothes  in  the  occidental  world, 
woman  has  succeeded  in  making  man  an  osten- 
sible monogamist  here.  In  the  Orient,  where 
the  feminine  styles  never  change,  and  woman 
dresses  under  man's  complete  dominion,  with- 
out a  single  inspiration  of  her  own,  man  re- 
mains an  unhampered,  full-winged  polygamist. 

When  I  was  in  India,  some  time  ago,  one 
of  the  weirdly  picturesque  and  pitiful  sights 
to  me  there  was  to  see  the  Mohammedan  ladies 
moving  like  spectres  through  the  colorful 
throngs  of  the  oriental  streets.  Completely 
concealed  by  their  bundlesome,  white  draperies, 
with  two  holes  for  their  eyes,  they  looked  as  if 
in  some  grotesque  Hallowe'en  disguise. 

With  these  shrouded  Mohammedan  ladies, 
man  has  achieved  the  consummate  realization 
of  his  avowed  tastes  and  sartorial  dictations. 


EVE'S  DRESS  207 

They  are  living  embodiments  of  the  modesty 
of  the  sex. 

In  a  Zenana  at  Delhi  I  met  an  educated  and 
very  intelligent  Indian  lady,  the  wife  of  a 
Nawab  of  Oudh,  who  expressed  some  advanced 
and  Western  views  regarding  the  conditions  of 
her  sex.  I  inquired  why  she  and  other  Indian 
women  of  her  class  and  views  did  not  inaugur- 
ate a  "dress-reform"  as  the  first  and  most  im- 
portant emancipation  for  oriental  women. 

"Yes,"  she  replied,  "most  of  us  are  well 
aware  that  our  unhealthy  clothing  and  veiling 
are  the  cause  of  the  general  ill-health  of  Indian 
ladies.  But  what  lady  would  dare  discard  her 
veil?  Why,  the  men  would  be  horrified!  No 
man  would  marry  her,  and  if  married  she  would 
be  divorced.  She  would  be  looked  upon  as  an 
immodest,  shameless  creature!" 

It  made  me  wonder  if  the  male  sex  is  the  in- 
ventor and  sole  custodian  of  "woman's  mod- 
esty." 

It  is  indisputable  that  the  women  of  all  na- 
tions show  an  astonishing  alacrity  in  discard- 
ing whatever  superfluities  of  clothing  the 
squeamishness  of  Mr.  Grundy  will  allow. 


208      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

Last  August  the  American  newspapers  related 
the  attack  of  a  mob  of  men  upon  a  woman,  wife 
of  a  wealthy  hotel  proprietor,  who  appeared  on 
the  beach  at  Atlantic  City  in  a  daring  "slit- 
skirt"  costume.  She  was  so  seriously  injured 
by  the  chivalrous  sex  that  she  had  to  be  taken 
to  a  hospital.  Woman  dresses  for  man  and  by 
man,  but  to  please  man  with  her  dress  is  evi- 
dently a  different  matter,  and  an  historically 
and  exegetically  impossible  feat. 

Woman  has  done  her  gallant  utmost  to  ad- 
mire, humor  and  honor  man  through  all  his 
follies  of  fashion,  from  tattooing  and  war- 
feathers  to  priestly  petticoats  and  Judge's  big 
wigs ;  and  how  has  he  returned  the  compliment  ? 

Adam  and  St.  Paul  led  the  way.  And  all 
the  saintly  fathers  followed  with  echoes  and 
individual  discoveries  of  the  natural  tendencies 
of  woman  to  improper  clothing.  Tertullian 
wrote  a  treatise  describing  the  proper  dress  for 
virgins.  St.  Clement  of  Alexandria  was  the 
inspiration  for  a  Papal  "bull,"  issued  as  late 
as  1800,  against  woman's  "indecency"  in  dress, 
holding  up  for  holy  horror  "the  sensations  it 
may  excite  even  in  the  withered  bosom  of  a 


EVE'S  DRESS  209 

monk."  Ancient  Rome  and  Sparta  gave  a 
new  order  of  dress  restrictions  for  women ;  and 
the  time-hallowed  masculine  meddlesomeness 
has  never  ceased  for  a  day. 

It  was  imported  into  the  promising  New 
World  with  our  uncompromising  Puritan  fore- 
fathers. Whitfield  tiraded  against  the  * 'fool- 
ish virgins  of  New  England  covered  all  over 
with  the  Pride  of  Life";  and  "sad-colors"  was 
the  name  given  to  the  hues  selected  as  the 
proper  ones  for  well-conducted  colonial  ladies 
to  wear.  Massachusetts  enacted  sumptuary 
laws  to  abolish  "wicked  apparel,"  and  forbade 
the  purchase  or  manufacture  of  any  slashed 
clothes  "except  those  with  one  slash  in  each 
sleeve  and  another  slash  in  the  back."  Slashes, 
we  see,  are  always  objects  of  hostile  Puritan 
suspicion.  But  in  spite  of  the  most  drastic 
decrees,  history  relates  that  "In  Newbury,  in 
1653,  two  women  were  brought  up  for  wearing 
silk  hoods  and  scarfs,  but  they  were  discharged 
on  proof  that  their  husbands  were  worth  £200 
each.  Thirty-eight  women  of  the  Connecticut 
Valley  were  presented  at  one  time  for  various 
degrees  of  finery,  and  of  too  small  estate  to 


210      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

wear  silk.  A  young  girl  named  Hannah  Ly- 
man  was  presented  for  wearing  silk  in  a  flaunt- 
ing manner,  in  an  offensive  way  and  garb,  not 
only  before  but  when  she  stood  presented." 

Maurice  Low  writes  of  these  dour  days  that 
"so  eager  were  the  women  to  be  in  fashion  that 
the  pseudo-humble  follower  of  Saint  Crispin, 
the  Simple  Cobbler  of  Agawan,  who  seems  to 
have  concerned  himself  more  with  women's 
souls  than  men's  soles,  vented  his  scorn  on  the 
'nugiperous  gentledames'  of  the  colony  who 
were  so  frivolous  as  to  ask  'what  dress  the 
Queen  is  in  this  week'  and  who  instead  of  lis- 
tening to  pious  exhortations,  must  needs  fill 
their  minds  with  the  Very  newest  fashion  of 
the  Court,'  and  he  poured  forth  all  the  vials 
of  his  wrath  on  the  'woman  who  lives  but  to 
ape  the  newest  court  fashion'  by  pronouncing 
her  'the  very  gizzard  of  a  trifle,  the  product  of 
a  quarter  of  a  cypher — the  epitome  of  nothing, 
fitter  to  be  kicked,  if  she  were  of  a  kickable 
substance,  than  either  honored  or  humored.' 
Only  a  few  years  after  the  establishment  of 
the  colony  it  was  found  necessary  to  enact  ordi- 
nances prohibiting  the  wearing  of  short  sleeves 


EVE'S  DRESS  211 

by  women  so  as  to  reveal  their  arms ;  nor  must 
women  appear  with  'naked  breasts  or  arms,  or 
as  it  were  pinioned  with  superstitious  ribbons 
on  hair  and  apparel.' '  Even  when  woman's 
self-adornment  and  beauty  were  made  actually 
perilous  to  her  life,  as  in  the  days  of  witch- 
burning,  it  did  not  seem  to  deter  her  from  the 
witchery  of  dress,  for  woman  is  not  by  nature 
a  social-coward  such  as  the  Old  Adam  has  so 
amply  proven  himself  to  be. 

The  improper  dress  has  been  as  autocratic- 
ally designed  and  enforced  by  man,  as  the 
proper  dress  for  woman.  In  Spain  women  of 
a  certain  class  were  once  legally  sanctioned  "to 
bare  their  shoulders;  and  all  dressmakers  who 
furnished  the  interdicted  gowns  to  others  than 
courtesans  were  condemned  to  four  years'  penal 
servitude."  To-day  in  Spain  a  woman  appear- 
ing in  public  without  a  mantilla  or  hat  can  be 
insulted  with  impunity  as  being  of  questionable 
virtue.  The  Greek  courtesans  were  required 
to  wear  costumes  of  "flowered  stuff" ;  the  Ro- 
mans made  them  wear  upon  their  arm  a  knot 
of  yellow;  the  Italians  once  made  them  wear 
"natural  or  dyed  blond  hair"  to  distinguish 


212      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

them  from  their  lawfully  virtuous  sisters;  and 
in  Japan  the  filles  de  joie  must  wear  their  obi 
tied  in  front,  besides  other  dress  specifications. 

An  old  illustrator  in  the  twelfth  century  is 
said  to  have  represented  Satan  as  the  lady  of 
the  period  in  the  latest  fashions  of  the  day;  and 
in  the  twentieth  century  the  fashionable  lady 
still  seems  to  appear  to  the  clergy  in  this  sem- 
blance for  they  never  cease  to  greet  her  new 
appearances  each  season  with  scorn  and  ex- 
orcism; undaunted  by  the  fact  that  she  fills 
nearly  all  the  pews  of  their  congregations. 
The  argus-eyed  pulpit  discovered  woman's 
open-work  stockings  and  "peek-a-boo"  waists 
as  a  crime  against  man,  years,  centuries  it 
seems,  before  it  discovered  any  of  the  crimes 
against  woman — white-slavery,  industrial- 
slavery,  political- slavery,  etc. — now  fashion- 
ably assailed  by  the  clergy,  in  obedience  to  the 
irrepressible  spirit  of  interrogation  that  marks 
the  new  Woman- Age. 

The  1913  fashions  in  dress:  the  slit-skirt, 
shadow-gown,  X-ray-gown,  street-decollete 
and  various  transparencies,  divisions  and  ultra- 
close  fittings  of  the  hour — have  aroused  such  a 


EVE'S  DRESS  213 

storm  of  abuse  and  evil-soothsaying  from  Pul- 
pit, Press  and  Man  of  the  World,  that  one  is 
not  surprised  to  find  the  Medical  Men  step 
forth  with  authority  upon  the  question.  The 
Director  of  the  Health  Department,  Dr.  E.  R. 
Walters,  of  Pittsburg,  recently  made  a  pub- 
lic statement:  "In  looking  over  my  statistics 
I  find  that  there  has  been  a  slight  increase  of 
nervous  diseases  among  men  this  summer,  and 
I  strongly  suspect  that  the  slashed  skirt  has  had 
something  to  do  with  it." 

One  is  forced  to  inquire,  what  is  the  cause 
of  these  unprecedented  conniptions  over  wom- 
an's dress?  What  is  she  really  doing,  that  she 
has  never  done  before? 

A  story  much  repeated  in  London  last  sum- 
mer was  about  an  English  woman  shopping  in 
Paris,  who  had  a  dress  offered  her  by  a  v en- 
deuse  with  this  inducement  to  buy  it:  "Ma- 
dame sera  satisfaite  de  cette  robe,  car  en  met- 
tant  un  ruban  rose  dessous,  Madame  aura  I3 air 
complement  nue" 

Is  this  the  desideratum  of  the  present  tenden- 
cies in  dress? 

That  over-burdened  Caryatid  of  the  latest 


214      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

feminine  mistakes  and  misbehavior,  the  Suffra- 
gette, is  incriminated  also  in  this  Trial  of 
Woman's  Dress.  For  they  do  say  that  her 
antics  and  advice  have  made  woman  hanker  to 
don  the  enviable  trouser,  and  that  this  is  the 
Ultima  Thule  of  the  present  tendencies. 

Will  women  wear  trousers  in  1914? 

If  the  misdeed  occurs,  let  us  pray  that  the 
Legislatures  will  not  disturb  national  and  civic 
affairs  by  penalizing  it,  for  already  it  has  been 
tried  and  found  wanting  by  ever  curious 
woman.  In  France,  when  trousers  first  came 
into  general  vogue  for  men — during  the  Reign 
of  Terror — they  were  adopted  also  by  the 
women  and  worn  for  a  brief  spell.  That  one 
sublime  approach  to  Liberty,  Equality  and 
Brotherhood,  changed  the  face  of  the  world, 
but  it  did  not  succeed  in  changing  the  style  or 
structure  of  woman.  Following  the  Revolu- 
tion, woman  made  haste  to  don  the  opposite 
extreme  in  fashion.  The  Merveilleuse  became 
the  "craze";  a  gown  surprisingly  similar  to 
those  under  dispute  to-day :  filmy,  flowing,  friv- 
olous, tied  in  at  the  knees  and  with  a  tunic, 
sometimes  split  from  the  hips.  In  Alice  Morse 


EVE'S  DRESS  215 

Earle's  study  of  Costume  in  America  she 
speaks  of  these  split  gowns  appearing  in  this 
country  also  in  the  1807  fashions.  She  says, 
"I  have  seen  these  robes  brought  out  of  old 
trunks  in  staid  New  England  homes — gowns 
of  fine  organdie  or  mull,  scant,  with  a  narrow 
tail-like  train;  so  low-necked  that  they  were 
indeed  incroyable;  slit  up  at  one  side  nearly  to 
the  waist.  One  was  the  wedding  gown  of  a 
parson's  wife." 

So  the  new  woman  of  to-day  is  not  quite  so 
new  as  she  appears  to  man  to  be. 

We  grow  confused  in  approaching  the  cru- 
cial point  and  eternal  quibble,  decency  or  inde- 
cency in  dress,  when  Mrs.  Earle  informs  us 
further  that,  in  our  discreet  grandfatherly 
days:  "Old  men  of  courtly  tastes  clung 
closely  to  knee-breeches,  and  deemed  trousers 
careless,  inelegant  and  vulgar.  Old  ladies  had 
a  similar  horror  of  drawers  and  never  wore 
them."  Perfumes  have  been  accused  of  inde- 
cency. The  Reverend  Stubbes  called  them 
"allurements  to  sin,  provocations  to  vice." 
Egyptian  women  consider  it  indecent  to  expose 
the  backs  of  their  heads.  The  Mohammedan 


216      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

thinks  any  visible  inkling  of  a  woman's  flesh 
is  indecent.  Savages  say  that  clothes  upon 
their  women  are  indecent,  because  it  has  a  de- 
moralizing effect  upon  the  men.  Medical  lit- 
erature reveals  that  there  are  men  who  experi- 
ence the  hysterics  of  Eros  at  the  sight  of  an 
empty  feminine  garment  or  slipper.  Is  this 
because  of  the  indecency  or  immorality  of  the 
empty  garment  or  slipper? 

In  the  endeavor  to  define  decency  and  inde- 
cency in  dress,  I  think  we  can  be  safe  in  say- 
ing that  the  positive  and  undeviating  indecency 
in  woman's  dress  is  constituted  by  its  ugliness, 
absurdities  of  exaggeration,  and  unhealthiness. 
Thus  the  inquisitorial  corsets,  tiny  waists,  vo- 
luminous petticoats,  hoops  and  bustles  of  our 
grandmothers,  were  wholly  indecent  because 
ugly,  exaggerated  and  unhealthy.  The  race 
has  suffered  indeed  because  of  these  decrees  of 
fashion  for  our  grandmothers.  But  in  the 
fashions  of  to-day  there  are  some  salient  points 
of  worth  which  ought  to  be  perpetuated  by 
the  statute  and  the  admiration  of  Mr.  Grundy. 
The  big  waist,  now  in  vogue,  is  a  veritable  god- 
send; and  the  drapery  and  upper  roominess  of 


EVE'S  DRESS  217 

the  present  modish  skirts,  are  a  chef  d'oeuvre 
of  grace  and  common  sense.  Even  the  mis- 
chievous slit  is  but  a  safe  little  exit  from  the  in- 
decent and  absurd  hobble  and  harem  skirts  of 
last  year. 

The  tailor-made  suit  has  done  more  to  eman- 
cipate the  American  woman  than  any  other 
influence.  It  inspired  her  to  work,  play,  and 
health.  As  athletic  Miss  Columbia,  she  is  now 
the  admired  of  nations,  though  statistics  are 
occasionally  brought  forth  to  show  that  she  is 
growing  disproportionately  big  in  comparison 
to  her  rather  stationary  little  brother.  But  the 
American  woman  is  the  worst  offender  of  her 
sex  in  her  misuse  of  woman's  right  of  dress. 
In  her  we  see  fully  exemplified  the  truth  that 
woman's  aesthetic  sense  is  at  last  as  withered, 
useless  and  dangerous,  as  the  vermiform  appen- 
dix. 

At  a  convention  at  the  Chicago  Dressmak- 
ers' Club,  a  few  months  ago,  the  following 
schedule  was  given  in  estimating  woman's 
yearly  expenditures  for  clothes: 

"A  few,  $75,000. 

"One  hundred  social  leaders,  $50,000. 


218      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

"Ten  thousand  others,  $5,000. 

"Well  dressed  women,  $1,500. 

"The  Suffragette,  $500. 

"The  Church  worker,  $500. 

"The  Social  worker,  $300. 

"The  stenographer,  $275. 

"The  shop  girl,  $250. 

"The  factory  girl,  $200." 

The  expenditures  of  the  first  three  classes 
of  women  would  drop  down  to  that  of  the 
fourth,  the  "well  dressed  women,"  if  these  rich 
women  possessed  any  real  aesthetic  sense  or 
vivid  individuality.  The  fashionable  woman 
may  be  a  personage,  but  she  is  rarely  a  person- 
ality. Her  superfluity  of  clothes  is  the  mask 
of  her  inner  nakedness.  When  woman's  real 
personality  begins,  the  tyranny  of  clothes  ends. 

Fashionable  American  women  are  noted  for 
their  imitativeness  in  dress.  With  monkey- 
like  prehension,  they  seize  upon  all  the  newest 
and  latest  appearances  in  fashion  regardless  of 
their  beauty  or  suitability.  French  taste,  their 
dress-makers'  opinion,  or  what  the  Fifth  Ave- 
nue girl  is  wearing,  are  substituted  as  a  guide 
in  place  of  their  own  atrophied  aesthetic  sense. 


EVE'S  DRESS  219 

Therefore  we  have  that  paradox  in  America: 
women,  apes  in  dress  and  anarchs  in  disposi- 
tion. 

A  rich  woman's  wardrobe  is  the  record  of 
her  irresponsible  taste.  It  is  a  veritable  bone- 
yard  for  brand-new  but  cast-off  clothes.  She 
must  have  a  new  dress  every  day — because  she 
is  incapable  of  recognizing  the  consummate  be- 
coming when  she  possesses  it.  Nothing  she 
buys  can  equal  to  her  the  gowns  she  sees  be- 
decking her  friends  or  the  mannikins.  Every- 
thing on  display  is  so  much  more  alluring  than 
when  in  her  possession.  She  admires  every- 
thing off,  but  nothing  on  herself.  How  hide- 
ous the  styles  of  last  season,  as  soon  as  the  new 
ones  dawn!  And  with  this  glimpse  into  the 
mind  of  the  typical  Mondaine,  we  can  under- 
stand the  American  disease  of  extravagance, 
contracted  from  the  "buying-craze"  of  the 
American  woman  which  Magnan  declared  to 
be  a  stigma  of  degeneration,  and  named  Onio- 
mania. 

When  men  pay  the  exorbitant  dress  bills  of 
their  wives  they  are  paying  one  of  the  many 
penalties  man  now  pays  for  the  mistake  of  our 


220      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

progenitors  in  depriving  woman  of  the  exer- 
cise of  her  aesthetic,  mating  instinct. 

Whenever  I  observe  street-crowds  of  the  hu- 
man species,  I  am  struck  by  the  overwhelming 
generality  of  the  physically  degenerate  speci- 
mens of  the  male  sex :  under  or  over  sized,  un- 
symmetrical,  grotesquely  proportioned,  weak 
or  brutalized  faces,  with  mongrel  features ;  and 
I  think  here  is  the  visible  commentary  upon 
the  loss  of  the  aesthetic  sense  of  woman.  Man 
now  buys  from  woman  what  nature  intended 
her  to  give. 

Would  society  be  full,  as  it  is,  of  ugly  rich 
Calibans  married  to  the  loveliest  Aphrodites, 
if  woman  possessed  her  right  to  choose  her 
mate  with  an  aesthetic  conscience?  The  reason 
is  plain  why,  as  a  rule,  all  unattractive,  senile, 
ugly  men  are  instinctively  opposed  to  the  fur- 
ther emancipation  of  woman. 

But  the  present  controversy  over  dress  does 
not  touch  upon  the  philosophy  of  aesthetics  in 
the  matter;  only  morality  seems  involved. 
How  far  away  is  our  Hellenic  Renaissance! 
Renan  can  illuminate  us  upon  this  point,  since 
he  has  written  something  that  has  been  quoted 


EVE'S  DRESS  221 

with  approval  by  the  great  moralist  Tolstoi. 
"The  fault  of  Christianity  is  well  disclosed;  it 
is  too  exclusively  moral,  it  has  altogether  sac- 
rificed beauty.  Whereas,  in  the  eyes  of  a  com- 
plete philosophy,  beauty,  far  from  being  a  mere 
superficial  advantage,  of  danger,  an  inconveni- 
ence, is  a  gift  of  God,  like  virtue.  It  is  as 
worthy  as  virtue,"  and,  "Woman  in  embellish- 
ing herself  accomplishes  a  duty;  she  practises 
an  art,  an  exquisite  art,  in  a  sense  the  most 
fascinating  of  arts.  Do  not  let  us  be  led 
astray  by  the  smile  which  certain  words  pro- 
voke in  the  frivolous.  Mankind  awards  the 
palm  of  genius  to  the  artistic  Greek,  who  knew 
how  to  solve  the  most  delicate  of  problems,  the 
adornment  of  the  human  body,  which  is  to 
adorn  perfection  itself;  and  yet  some  people 
wish  to  see  only  an  affair  of  rags  in  the  attempt 
to  further  God's  finest  work,  woman's  beauty. 
Woman's  toilette,  with  all  its  delicacies,  is,  in 
its  way,  high  art.  Epochs  and  nations  which 
know  how  to  succeed  in  this  are  the  great 
epochs  and  the  great  nations.  The  history  of 
Christianity  shows  that  by  excluding  this  spe- 
cies of  art  it  postponed  the  full  development  of 


222      VENTURES  IN  WORLDS 

the  social  ideal  which  it  conceived,  to  a  much 
later  period,  when  the  revolt  of  men  of  the 
world  had  broken  the  narrow  yoke  primitively 
imposed  upon  the  sect  by  an  exalted  fanati- 


cism." 


In  this  enlightened  epoch  of  proclaimed 
broad-mindednes  and  laisser-faire,  why  is  it 
that  women's  new  experiments  in  dress  have 
so  increased  the  vocal  scandalization  of  man? 

We  must  remember  the  play  where  Tar- 
tuff  e  bade  Dorine  cover  her  neck  with  a  hand- 
kerchief lest  his  soul  be  wounded.  "You  are 
very  tender  to  temptation,"  she  retorts,  "and 
the  flesh  makes  a  great  impression  upon  your 
senses.  I  am  not  so  easily  moved." 

It  is  the  hyperaesthesia  of  the  over-sexed 
modern  man  which  makes  him  so  easily 
and  excessively  scandalized  to-day.  Modern 
woman,  more  chastely  willed  and  trained  than 
man,  is,  so  noticeably,  less  "modest." 

But  for  the  sake  of  peace  on  earth,  good-will 
to  men,  I  would  like  to  present  a  mammoth 
petition  to  the  modern  Eve  of  to-day's  fash- 
ions, entreating  her  not  to  dress  and  undress 


EVE'S  DRESS  223 

in  public,  as  she  is  doing,  during  this  fleshy 
sex  o'clock  time,  not  because  of  the  immodesty 
of  her  conduct,  but  because  of  the  immodest 

modesty  of  man. 

*     *     * 


THE   END 


AN  INITIAL  PINE  OP  25  CENTS 


LD  21-loOm-8,'34 


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a 

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341 8CS 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


